After a brief Respite…

After a brief respite, Penguin Shell is moving forward with the next distribution in Distro II - Caldera OpenLinux.

As has been the protocol for this round of reviews, let’s take a brief look at the history of Caldera and OpenLinux in particular. Formed in 1994 by Ransom Love and Bryan Sparks, Caldera’s constant mission has been to provide businesses with a viable Linux solution. By developing business relationships with more than 20,000 partners, Caldera has consistently broadened the scope of business applications available for Linux.

A key contribution of Caldera to the Linux community is the Lizard (Linux Installation wiZARD) installer. It’s a stable and user-friendly application for both inital and supplemental software installation. Several other Linux distributions have since adopted Lizard as the standard, including such developing distributions as Lycoris.

Like the leaders of many commercial Linux companies, Caldera CEO and co-founder Ransom Love has often fallen into the sights of GNU guru Richard Stallman. As recently as last year, Stallman called Ransom’s commitment to open source “lip service.” Ransom’s response is that Caldera “adds value” to Linux, helping to broaden the user base.

In my own previous experience with Caldera (OpenLinux 2.2), I found it to be relatively easy to install and to include a full compliment of tools. With that in mind, we’ll dig deeper into the installation process and security focus late this week and early next.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison