Re: Working Within the System

From: Charlie (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Tue May 02 2000 - 11:23:57 MDT


On Tue, May 02, 2000 at 04:35:09PM +0100, Martin Ling wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 02, 2000 at 08:13:53AM +0100, Charlie wrote:
>
> > Note that this was a comparison of a generation #1 product with a
> > generation #5 product. And the generation #1 product was in the same
> > ease-of-installation bracket as MacOS.
>
> As a brief point (maybe I'm jumping ahead of Michael here), it's
> probably not quite correct to say Corel's is generation #1, being built
> on a good deal of Linux development in general, and specifically being
> derived from Debian.

Iffy point. Corel took Debian 'Slink' and turned it into their own distro.
Along the way, they wrote their own installer -- the standard Debian one
is (cough, cough) not exactly user friendliness personified -- and then
bolted KDE on top of it. They filed a lot of rough edges off of KDE (I
suspect their usability testing experience came in very handy) and bolted
some extras into the distro. IIRC, Slink is Libc 5.0 based, and I vaguely
recall Corel using a 2.0 series kernel (though I may be wrong on that; I'm
working from memory).

What I think is worth noting is that the quality of their installer
improved noticeably between successive non-public betas and the final
release; the early betas couldn't even cope with a PS/2 mouse! That's why
I characterise it as a release 1.0 product; the kernel and command line
stuff certainly isn't, but what everyone's judging Corel by is the quality
of their installer and desktop integration, and _that_ is definitely still
a bit fresh. Although their 1.0 beats SuSE's 6.0 into a cocked hat, IMO ...



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