Welcome to the April Issue of Glen Cove Computing News. The feature article for this month's issue is Dr Linus or How I learned to love UNIX, documenting my experiences with Linux. In this sixth issue of Glen Cove Computing News you'll also find:
Linux is a Unix clone for Intel-based PCs written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix, including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management and TCP/IP networking. It uses the hardware features of the 386 processor family (TSS segments et al) to implement these features.
For my first experience with Linux I chose Caldera's Network Desktop. The Caldera Network Desktop is a complete Internet/Intranet networked desktop and server environment built on the Red Hat Commercial Linux distribution. The Caldera Network Desktop offers a fully graphical environment capable of authoring, navigating and publishing information to the Internet and Intranets. The Caldera Network Desktop is also a NetWare Client and provides client and server access to Microsoft Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT and Windows 95, and all existing UNIX network systems. In addition Caldera has licensed Netscape Navigator, which can be downloaded on this page by clicking on the Netscape Now! icon in the GCC Navigator.
The first version of Network Desktop that I installed was a Preview edition that I purchased for $29 from Caldera. Afer a couple of false starts the installation was completed and I began to explore the Network Desktop. Unfortunately I found that I was unable to access my network through the ethernet card and the X Windows System would only run in monochrome VGA mode. After a week of troubleshooting these problems without success I blew away the installation and reinstalled Windows 95.
Luckily a few months later a second Preview edition was sent to me by Caldera. Being a glutton for punishment I decided to give the Network Desktop another try. This time the installation went smoothly as Caldera had added a graphical installation process. The graphical installation took around 30-45 minutes for a complete installation of the Linux operating system and the Caldera Network Desktop. Still when I booted Linux for the first time I still couldn't access my network, although I was able to run the X Windows System in SVGA mode for the first time.
Now one of the drawbacks of the preview editions of Network Desktop was that there was almost no technical support available from Caldera. Unable to access my network or the internet I turned to the greatest resource for Caldera Network users: the Caldera Email List Server. I subscribed to the caldera-users@caldera.com email list. This list is a forum to discuss Caldera products and to discuss and resolve common problems. There is also a digest format version of caldera-users called caldera-users-digest. To become familiar with the email list server and to learn how to subscribe to any of these lists, you can send a message with the word help in the body of the message to majordomo@caldera.com. To subscribe to the caldera-users list email the command subscribe caldera-users to majordomo@caldera.com.
Within three hours of submitting my problem to the caldera-users list I received at least five responses from other subscribers on the list. All of them had run into the same problem I had with my ethernet card. The 3Com ethernet card I was using supported plug and pray which is not supported by Linux. In order to make the card work with Linux I had to reboot the PC with a DOS boot diskette, run the 3Com configuration program, and disable Plug and Play. While I held my breath and crossed my fingers I rebooted the PC and YES! I could see my network.
I've been running the Network Desktop now for the past month and have set up an Intranet web server and an FTP server. Of course the FTP and HTTP server daemons are built into the Network Desktop system, so the setup was a breeze. I've installed Netscape 2.x for Linux and some other freeware packages for the most part successfully. For an inexpensive introduction to UNIX you can't beat Linux. If you can muddle through without written documentation you can even download a freeware version of Linux and several of the components that are included in the Caldera Network Desktop from various internet sites. Still there are several components that are unique to the Network Desktop including the Netware client.
The official 1.0 version of the Network Desktop was released on February 5th at a retail price of $99 and includes access to Caldera's technical support staff. Until April 5th anyone who purchases the Caldera Network Desktop can purchase a bundle of WordPerfect ported to Caldera's platform and Metrolink's Executive Motif Libraries for $125. For $199 anyone who purchases the Caldera Network Desktop may also purchase the Caldera Internet Office suite. The Caldera Internet Office Suite's native applications include:
The Internet Site of the month for April is SALON. An interactive magazine of books, arts and ideas featuring prominent writers, debates and conversation between readers. Inside SALON you'll find feature articles like "Stars for a Day" by Richard Covington about the 16th Paris Book Fair; reviews of movies, books, and music; columns like Cintra Wilson's "The Awful Truth", and departments like "Lit Chat" which in the latest issue features an interview with Oliver Sacks.
Cartoon of the Month
Thanks to Gabe Martin for placing his comic strip in the public domain. See more of Gabe's work at
The Internet Technology of the month for April is Netscape 2.x from Netscape. The newest release of Netscape Navigator supports a wide variety of platforms including Linux. Netscape Navigator provides a common feature set and interface across Windows, Macintosh and UNIX and is the most widely used Internet client in the world today.
With version 2.x, Netscape has integrated email into Netscape Navigator. You can embed Internet URL links and complete HTML pages into mail messages. Netscape has also added a number of other features including:
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