[TriLUG] Opinions on Redmond / Lycoris

[al johson]

Yes, I, as a newbie, have a little experience with Redmond Linux (which I
installed thanks to Linux Format magazine including it recently on two of
their magazine CD's). Incidentally, they did not refer to it as "Lycoris".
Anyway, to me it looked like a good beginning which needed a lot of work,
especially with the applications included with the distribution. The
installation was rather painless, but suffered from a big disability,
namely, since the way hardware was installed on the version Linux Format
Magazine published was by simply naming the manufacturer and model number of
the various hardware on your computer. A very simple way to accomplish the
task. It's a great method, IF THE HARDWARE LIST IS UP TO DATE!!
Unfortunately, my video card (Matrox 450) was not on the list (only the 400
was listed)--my card worked with that choice but not as well as it should.
Ditto for my Viewsonic A70 monitor and several other pieces of hardware.
This defect was also noted in the accompanying LINUX FORMAT magazine article
as well. There were some other defects as well which you can read about
there. Naturally it is possible what I'm about to say about Redmond Linux
has been fixed, but considering what needs to be fixed, I'd be surprised if
it has been.

The desktop was the most (or should I say "only") impressive thing about the
distribution. Just about anyone who knows their way around the Windows 9x
series would have no problem finding where things were located, even though
Redmond uses KDE and Gnome. Actually though I was more impressed with the
"Floe" desktop which was demonstrated a few months ago at a Tri-lug
meeting!!

The part that was the biggest bummer was the applications included in the
installation which for the most part just didn't work without constantly
crashing and hanging up the computer. There were actually more that didn't
work as opposed to those which did. In short, it looked as if they needed to
do a lot more work insuring that all the applications that were installed
(and the distribution encourages people not to pick and choose applications
so there is actually no excuse for this problem) actually worked. I'm used
to some applications not working in all the distributions I've sampled
(Caldera, Red Hat and Mandrake) but not the large number of that Redmond
presents a newbie user (which is primarily the intended user of this
distribution). If they ever keep their hardware lists up to date and get the
applications to work, this could indeed be an excellent system for
beginners. As of now, I would not recommend this distribution to Linux
beginners.
Al Johnson.

----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Helms <Mike.Helms at martinmarietta.com>
To: <trilug at trilug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2002 8:53 PM
Subject: [TriLUG] Opinions on Redmond / Lycoris


> Hi everyone,
>
> Just a quick solicitation of opinions ... I have a spare box (Dell Celeron
> 333 with 384 megs of RAM, 20GB hard disk, etc.), and I'm toying with a
> number of Linux/Unix distributions on it.  My favorites thus far are
Caldera
> Server as a server OS, and Lyrocis (based on Caldera) as a workstation OS.
>
> Does anyone else have experience with the Lycoris (formerly Redmond)
> distribution?  I have to admit that I like the lazy man's approach to
> installation and Windows networking, but I'm more concerned about
long-term
> stability.
>
> Cheers,
> -- Mike Helms
> _______________________________________________
> TriLUG mailing list
>     http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> TriLUG Organizational FAQ:
>     http://www.trilug.org/~lovelace/faq/TriLUG-faq.html