Re: corel linux demo
--- Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 30, 1999 at 05:29:29AM -0700, Kenneth
> Scharf was heard to say:
> > They said that the beta of their linux distro will
> be
> > available for public download by the end of
> October.
>
> Hm. Do you have any information about the
> following issues:
>
> -> How big is it? The only spare partition I
> could try this out on is an
> old swap partition (currently used for Hurd, but
> I don't have time to
> fiddle with that at the moment..). If corel is
> going to shovel tons of
> stuff (eg, X and KDE) onto my disk, I doubt I
> can even try it.
> -> How 'nice' is it? If it's a <6 minute install,
> I doubt it really gives
> you options about what to do. I don't need it
> clobbering my Windows
> installation -- or, worse, my current Linux
> installation! More annoying
> would be if it decided that it was going to
> install LILO for me (I use
> GRUB to boot)
>
I would guess that it's at least as big as a minimal
install of Mandrake. They won't be including as many
aps as debian has, they will probably 'farm' the
debian selection for the most popular ones.
Also they mentioned that their install process is to
install first and configure later. This means that
the user does not need to worry about things like
network addresses when first getting the os on the
computer. Only once linux is up and running and you
can actually log in do you set up networking, mail and
such. (Of course if you are installing OVER a network
in an enterprise setup this changes things a
litte....)
> I'd like to at least take a look at this and see
> what they fixed (I seem to
> remember hearing that they eliminated the horrible
> flat organization we use for
> packages and put in some sort of logical hierarchy)
> but I can't conjure up disk
> space or risk my current installations..
>
They did mention that their installer understood
package hierarchy but I only saw a static snapshot of
a current install of packages. They did not demo the
actual install of any packages. However the display
did look better than glint or gnorpm, with a better
user interface. It also looked much better than
dselect (but then again dselect is rather long in the
tooth.)
> > Oh BTW they were also giving away copies of
> > Wordperfect for linux, personal edition (CD
> only).
> > Wordperfect is the only app they have ported as a
> > Native linux binary, and after version 8, they
> > probably won't be doing a linux native binary
> version.
> > So WP version 9 will be a win32 binary under
> Wine.
>
> Are you sure? Wine is not only a
> binary-compatibility system; it also aims
> for source-compatibility. They might just be using
> the Windows version as the
> canonical source.
>
I understood wine as being a library that intercepted
win32 calls and redirected those calls into the
correct X or linux libraries for handling. Corel
intends (as I understand it) to ship the actual
windows binaries (.exes) and maybe even .dll's with
whatever wrappers are required to run them under Wine.
There will probably even be a Wine based program
launcher that will trigger of an icon for the
installed program on the desktop or 'K bar'. Wine's
ultimate result is to make the win32 API become a
linux api as well. It would stand beside gtk++ and QT
in that regard. Also means that the "setup.exe"
program that is used by all windows apps to install
the thing would run under wine as well, only there
would NOT be a real windows partition on your
filesystem (though there would have to be a file
system or directory pointed to by the wine.conf file
to take it's place). Maybe I'm wrong about some of
these points but's that's how I interperted it.
=====
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