This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: cnet picks Corel as #1 over Red Hat & Caldera From: Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero@redhat.de> Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 18:10:47 +0100 (CET) On Mon, 13 Dec 1999, Frank Rocco wrote: > I also heard good things about Caldera. It's ok... a lot better than Corel. But far from being perfect - the things I don't like about Caldera are primarily: - they boot into framebuffer mode, and then run a normal X server on top of it (you should never do that, as it completely breaks on some hardware, and causes problems switching from a console to X and back on some cards) - some of their customizations are IMO weird (no close button on KDE windows) - some of their packages are quite outdated (for example, they're still with XFree86 3.3.4, apache 1.3.4, bzip2 0.9.0b, grep 2.2 and KDE 1.1.1) - They're KDE only, not even the base libraries for running GNOME applications are included. - Their installer and config tools used to be closed-source (I think that was fixed recently though; but I think they still aren't GPL). > The thing that confuses me the most > is GNOME or KDE as a desktop. It seems that the apps for KDE are farther > along. Both have their advantages and disadvantages - that's why Red Hat Linux gives you the choice. Purely IMO, most of the basic tools in KDE are farther along than GNOME, but right now, there's no KDE tool that is comparable to, for example, gnumeric (unless you get a KDE 2.0 pre-alpha snapshot). I don't see a problem in keeping both around (or focussing on one, but keeping at least the basic libraries of the other in the distribution. If the libraries are there, it's not a problem to run a GNOME application within KDE or vice versa). === Subject: Re: cnet picks Corel as #1 over Red Hat & Caldera From: Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero@redhat.de> Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 17:40:58 +0100 (CET) On Mon, 13 Dec 1999, Frank Rocco wrote: > http://linuxtoday.com/stories/13613.html > > Not sure why they chose it over Red Hat, Because apparently all they looked at is the installation process, and the layout of the desktop. The installer looks good, so does the modified KDE - but if you start looking beyond the obvious, you'll find a distribution that has far less packages than any other distribution I've seen, is outdated in extreme (even in places where updates would be important. Don't ever connect Corel Linux to a network without applying upgrades from a different distribution! There are at least 3 root exploits in it [one in bind, two more in proftpd]), not Y2K save (they're still using glibc 2.0, which has a known Y2K bug), buggy, and nonstandard (why did they choose dpkg over rpm??? And they could use newer libraries. Not even Corel's own WordPerfect will run on Corel Linux without modifying the installation). It looks very much like an improved version of Windows - fancy, but as soon as you start looking into it, crappy. I wonder if their next version will be any good. === Subject: Re: Debian or RPM? From: adam owensby <adam@ibm.net> Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 01:14:31 -0800 debian in my eyes is superior. the difference to you will be how they depend on other files redhat rpms when rpm notices that you are missing something required to install the rpm properly will tell you the file(s) needed. debian debs under the same circumstances will tell you a package you need rpms are more widespread than debs, but a program called alien (comes with corel linux) can convert 90% of them very easily i have tried every released redhat since 4. something, mandrake, and the others, and i'm running corel linux. ===