The Caldera Network Desktop Preview II

Caldera - http://www.caldera.com and ftp.caldera.com

the base system is

Red Hat Commercial Linux - http://www.redhat.com and ftp.redhat.com

Tips

RAM, and lots of it. As Matt mentioned in the ELF tutorial, running ELF and a.out on a box makes it a little slower than expected. Caldera is also very graphical, so when they say use 16M of RAM or more - they mean it! A fast video card is also a plus. The default installation requires about 160M of disk space.

Services setup by default (right out of the box!) that Slackware and others do not

  1. Looking Glass Desktop
  2. Caldera font server for X
  3. Apache Web server
  4. Netware client and IPX
  5. Samba SMB server
  6. TCP-Wrappers
  7. Arena Web Browser

Cool (from my point of view - network engineer) rpm's, other than above, that are included but not setup by default

  1. tcpdump
  2. SNMP utilities and mib from CMU

Missing stuff, IMHO

  1. If it is to be sold, as they say, "The Complete Client/Server Internet Solution" it needs to include more security services than just tcp-wrappers, including: socks, shadow passwords, etc..
  2. 'bind' is available as a rpm, but it is not installed by default.
  3. More rpm's. They can't have them for all programs, (licensing, volume, etc.) but they certainly need more if rpm is to be successful.

Possible Installation troubles

Problem: Graphical installation may lock at time zone setup. (I had no such problem)
Solution: Right click the window button and select quit.

Problem: Graphical Installation across multiple filesystems had questionable results.
Solution: Used the text-based installation.

Updates to get

rpm
Update to version 'rpm-1.4.6-1.i386.rpm' or later. (available at Red Hat & mirrors - including Caldera)
nwlogin
Newest version available at Caldera.
nwauth
Newest version available at Caldera.
Ld.so.1.7.11
Update to version 'ld.so.1.7.11-1.i386.rpm' or later. (available at Red Hat & mirrors - including Caldera)

Other bugs noted

Problem: When using graphical file manager, accessing an MS-DOS filesystem kills your X session.
Solution: Fixed in next release.

Problem: Sometimes closing the last open graphical file manager kills Looking Glass.
Solution: edit your '~/.Xclients' file so that 'lg' isn't the parent process. (remove the 'exec' preceding 'lg') Also fixed in next release.

Problem: When using the Netscape beta(3) the machine would sometimes become unusable for a while or lock completely.
Solution: Update the library listed above to 'ld.so.1.7.11'

Problem: Couldn't attach to all of the Netware servers.
Solution: None. Caldera nor I can understand why. Very few people are having this problem.

Problem: I couldn't get Glint to do much of anything.
Solution: None. No one else had problems. I suspect that I didn't install some piece used by Glint.

A Look at the Caldera Network Desktop

These graphics are somewhat large but provide a good preview of the Caldera Network Desktop "look" and tools.