[ale] Partition Magic

[Chris Ricker]

On Sun, 9 May 1999, Jim Kinney wrote:

> I have heard many good things. I have also seen many good things. It does
> what it claims to do. Caldera is even shipping a "lite" version with 2.2. 

On the other hand, the common experience for me and everyone I know who has
tried it is that it totally sucks.

The graphical boot disks would be cool, if they worked.  They didn't for me.
Not only that, they have no way of fixing things when they don't work (eg,
you can't force it where to look for your NFS-served cdrom; it just
magically probes somewhere, doesn't find it, and then quits instead of
letting you tell it the server to look at).

I had to fall back to the non-graphical LISA boot disks.  They were kernel
2.0-based.  This did *not* impress me, since it means that I couldn't do
little things like make a swap file over 128 megs (and I was wanting one
that was 512 megs).  They still didn't work, though at least they mounted
the cd share from the NFS server before they died with a cryptic message.

This has been what I've heard from other people as well (a lot of people out
here run Caldera, and a lot used to like it ;-).  If your machine is really
recent and you're installing from a bootable cd-rom drive in that machine,
and you only have one cd-rom in that machine, it might work.  If you're
doing anything at all "unusual," including things like NFS install, which
are clearly stated to be supported, it most likely will not work for you.

Since that machine doesn't and can't have a CD-ROM, and since none of the
alternative installation methods (ftp, etc.) worked either, I finally
installed it completely by hand (eg, boot off my trusty personal "rescue any
linux system" disks, make the partitions, mount the NFS-shared cd from the
server, copy it over to a temp partition, install the tarballs and rpms by
hand, etc.).  It was not worth all that effort, and I've since given the CD
away (I can be really cruel at times, as the person who thought they were
getting a present soon found out ;-) and put RH 5.9 and then 6 on that
machine instead.

My general impression was that more than 10 people should have beta-tested
the install process before they released it.

On the plus side, though, the fb boot disks, if they weren't so brain-dead,
would have been cool.  I know Debian's playing with doing an fb-based
graphical install for possible use in an upcoming release, and I think
RedHat is too.  Hopefully they'll do a better job with them.

In fairness to Caldera, I think they were focusing on the Windows
wizard-based install.  I didn't try that at all, since I didn't have windows
on the machine I was wanting to install on.  From what I've heard, that
generally seems to work.

later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom at gatech.edu
                                                  chris.ricker at m.cc.utah.edu