Although it's vaguely been mentioned on here, I have to say something
about Corel's distribution: it's really something special.
I have a Dell 400 with a mix of hardware on and off the supported list
(The NIC, monitor and sound card have been problems before). I finally
decided to reformat my drive and start over, and downloaded the Corel iso.
It boots up, asks me where I want to place it (though I took the time to
use its pretty neat advanced partitioning tool), asked me whether I wanted
a desktop, desktop plus (development), server, or custom package (chose
server). It reformatted my harddrive, installed packages, rebooted. After
entering a password, I found myself at a desktop. I changed the
resolution, launched a terminal, and typed in telnet, and it worked.
That's literally it. I haven't told it jack about my computer, and my
computer isn't exactly the most plug and play friendly. Although I'm sure
I'll find some idiosyncracies later on, I think it's very important to
emphasize how nice their installation is (completely graphical as well).
Yes, it does look a lot like Windows, but I don't understand why that's a
problem. The problems with Windows are mainly that it's a) not free/run by
Microsoft, and b) that it's less stable than a toddler on crack.
The problem is not its UI. It does have some annoying idiosyncracies and
flaws like any system, but it's also a well-known interface that virtually
all computer users are familiar with and can use easily, almost
transparently. If borrowing an transparent and familiar user-interface is
something Corel should be ashamed of, this sounds like a very weird
position to me.
In any case, I'll probably be writing into this list a bit more
frequently, seeing how I am a complete linux newbie, but just wanted to
comment on how easy this process has been.
stu / james.stuart@yale.edu / MC 02
you can see a million miles from here
but you can't get very far -- AD
www.despair.com /\ 203.436.3209
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