|> I'd like to hear from more Caldera Preview I folks that moved to II. So far,
|> I've heard only problems.
|>
|> Specifically, aside from functionality, was much changed with general dir
|> structure? I have built up a fair number of services on the Caldera I disk
|> (ftp and www sites, named, INN, etc.); it sounds like going to II could be a
|> bear. Comments?
It's all ELF now, and they have revamped the package manager such
that it isn't compatible with Preview I, so a complete reinstall
is required. Back up what you want to save, wipe and reinstall.
That's a "bear" if you don't have a tape backup or a spare hard drive
I guess.
Actually, it is not quite all ELF, the Visix desktop is still
a.out, which means that until they fix that it will use more memory
than before. I don't use the desktop much though, after a while I
decided that I like the fvwm popup menus.
The big change I was waiting for was the ability to print to Netware
print queues. Ironically, I haven't had a chance to test that yet.
They also have a new system editor Crisp Lite, that's a lot more
friendly for newbies than vi. And a sophisticated backup package,
BACKUP.UUNET, that seems to work well on SCSI tape but not on ftape.
They have made a few small changes to the directory structure,
mostly to comply with the standard (e.g. syslog is now in /var/log).
On a related note, they've cleaned up all those symlinks to the
kernel source and have done it the "normal" way. I have not noticed
anything that I'd call "major" changes to the directory structure.
I haven't had many problems. A few small things, like no "dir"
file for GNU Info, a couple harmless errors from the font server
when shutting down, didn't like the menu style they compiled Emacs
with, and they went back to the plain-jane xdm. All of these
either have fix packs on the ftp site or are just carping.
Others seem to be having a lot of trouble, but many appear to be
RTFM-related. A number of complaints on the mailing list have
turned out to be cases of "hack before you think", and not really
Caldera's fault.
If we're talking about a mission-critical system here, I would say
that if it works, then leave it the hell alone <g>! We still run
our gateway on a Slackware 1.2 setup that's now *almost* upgraded
to roughly Slackware 2.1 as we upgrade things as needed. No hurry,
eh? On a personal system, the upgrade might be worth doing to get
on ELF sooner rather than later.
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Bob Hauck Wasatch Communcations Group
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