2001.11_Testing the Bearops Linux.pdf

BEAROPS

SOFTWARE

BEAROPS LINUX

JOHN SOUTHERN

Designed to give you everything you need for the

home and office and all with a graphical desktop.

BearOps Linux has tough rivals to compete with.

A new distribution from the Canadian Alta Terra

Ventures Corp. Aimed at both the beginner and

seasoned computer techie alike the two CD package

does quite well.

The installation from the first CD is either via a

graphical installer if the video card is VESA2 compliant

or it forces a frame buffer install if not compliant.

Technical support is limited to a free half hour

installation call or free email support. After that

support is via a premium rate line. Calls are also

international to Canada. That said the installation

worked first time finding both a USB wheel mouse

and a SCSI interface.

There are two possible installation routes. The

Auto feature assumes that it can destroy the hard

drive contents and perform a new installation from

scratch. The Manual install route allows you to dual

boot the machine or just keep partitions that you

want to.

You can choose to use the ReiserFS journaling

system or the standard ext2 for your linux partitions.

The partitioning tool worked well and correctly resized

a Windows partition. The installation took eighteen

minutes but this was just the first disk to get the

standard configuration loaded.

The KDE desktop is started and then the additional

programs from the second CD can be installed. These

include Star Office from Sun, Mozilla and gPhoto (two

versions 0.4.3.1 and 2.0.1). The only disappointment

was that the disc had only 250MB of programs and so

400MB of packages were missed at the very least.

The manual explains how and where to get

additional software and for each compression type

Partitioning

the hard disk

how to load and install.

The only down side is in the manual. Although

well written in clear language that explained, but was

not patronising, it gave the appearance of being a

photocopy and so a cheap product. The online

manual had higher resolution images and so I would

recommend printing it out first.

Printing is via CUPS and the default browser is

Netscape 4.77 supplied with Adobe and RealPlayer..

Overall the distribution would have been

wonderful a year back and to be fair if you are after a

standard Linux with updated packages this would

suffice, yet somehow it now feels dated or at

least unfinished. The time and effort of the

manual is let down by the poor printing and

the system overall could have done with

someone adding a few more packages.

Without local helpline numbers the distribution

may fail to appeal to anyone outside Canada.

Konqueror up

and running

14 · 2001 LINUX MAGAZINE 49

DESKTOP OS

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