[ale] Linux and ale, Corel Linux

[Steven Rice]

Les Scourse wrote:
> 
> Hey do you guys know that you come up on beer and home-brew searches?  Not a total loss thought since I
> have an interest in both Linux and homemade ales, has anybody tried the Corel Linux OS yet?  I'd like to find
> a review but no-body seems to have tried it yet.
> Les

After this post i decided it was about time to install it.

I didn't finsh becuase I just got sick of the crap I had to put up
with.  From what I did see of it I wasn't impressed at all.  If i had a
larger hard drive or if was able to CHOOSE how my hard drive was setup I
might have got it installed.  I tried to install it on a friend's Acer
p133, 48 megs, 4x Cd-Rom, PCI Nic, 33.6 modem, Soundblaster 16, onboard
video and my largest spare, 540 megs, hard drive.

Some of the things I found out was this:

1) Pretty splash screens and GUI's don't help.  If you try to hide the
complex behind something simple you will only make it worst.  Linux is
to complex to be able to slap a GUI on it and expect it to work right.

2) Corel display little or no information about packages.  Unless the
user knows what the package is, they won't have a clue about what is it,
what it does, or how large it is.

3) The partitioning tool is a piece of junk.  It was doing some really
weird things.   If you partion the disk out side of the tool there isn't
a way to tell where to mount them thus you are forced to use it.  Funny
thing is fdisk work correct.  Why couldn't they just make a simple front
end to fdisk.  How hard would that be?

4) The installion program spent two hours copying stuff from the cd to
memory, then to thin air.  There seam to be no checks on hard drive
space VS package selected.  I got it down to where it said 250m and I
had a 360m / so it should have worked, wrong.  That was NOT 250m
postinstallion.  Do I even care if I copy 150megs or 250megs!!  I WOULD
LIKE TO KNOW HOW MUCH SPACE I'M GOING TO HAVE LEFT OVER!!!

5) GUI boot up, looks nice, but when combined with wierd non-standard
choices (surrounded by a pretty splash screen) can cause confusion.

|--------------------| 
|  1  Corel Linux    | 
|  2  VGA Mode       |
|  3  Console        |
|  4  Debug          |
|  5  Expert         |
|--------------------|

"Ok, boot to run level 1"  "Ok X11 started!! Now what??"

6) Default keyboard map was screwed.  You think they could go with the
standard US 101 key map.

7) I went through more crap with this installion of Linux then any other
distribution.  At least with other distro i had choices!

8) Corel has tried hard to make Linux to the desktop, but it seams to
have fallen short.


9) You get the idea Corel is making the statement

         "Since I know more, trust in me."


Over all:

Bastardized Debian distribution.  Extremly disappointing, lack of
control during installion, broken tools, escapes the meaning of Linux,
and distroys the meaning of a GNU lience.  Corel needs to rethink,
reprogram, and reconsider this "product".  


I'll keep to real Debian or SuSE, thanks.