[NCLUG] RedFlag Linux Review

[Sean Reifschneider]

Greetings.  I spent the weekend downloading RedFlag Linux (the one from
China), and thought I'd give a quick review of it.  This is largely related
to the installer and boot process.

RedFlag seems to be a Red Hat derrived distribution.  The initial boot
screen will look quite familiar to You Red Hat users.  Once you get out of
the text boot screen into the main GUI installer, you'll notice big changes
though.

It looks like they've completely re-worked the installer.  It includes
critical features such as angled progress bars.  :-)  Actually, they did a
great job with the installer.  Though it's limited to ReiserFS and ext2 for
file-system options.  One neat thing about it is that there is an
additional option available in the installer, which is "Uninstall RedFlag
Linux".  The icon for it is a recycle bin with tux-feet sticking out of
it...

The best part of the GUI installer is that they've enhanced the package
selection screen.  In addition to selecting the main groups of packages,
you can also "drill down" and see the individual packages in a particular
group, de-select some of them (though I didn't see that it was properly
dealing with de-selecting packages which required a package you removed).
You could also select the individual packages and get information on what
it did.

Unfortunately, there were also some problems with this screen.  First of
all the text in the info screen was 80 columns, and the info screen was at
most 40 wide -- so you had to scroll back and forth all the time.  Also,
when you selected one of the packages to see what it did, you also toggled
the selection state of it.  There didn't seem to be a way to select
independantly of toggling (with the mouse anyway).

The other thing I noticed was that the boot process (which was limited to
LILO, BTW), was using the graphical boot progress package, which shows Tux
marching with a big red flag, as a progress bar displays the boot progress.

That's really as much as I know.  The ISO for it is only around 450MB, so
obviously there's a lot missing over, say, KRUD, which is within a megabyte
or two of filling up 2 700MB CDs.

The installer is slick though.

The download took me 3 days, at between 3KB/sec and 10KB/sec.  If anyone
wants to pick up a copy, I seem to have some bandwidth that's being wasted
at the moment.  Let me know and I'll hook you up.

Sean
-- 
 Put out fires during the daytime.  Do your real work at night.
 Sleep is just an addiction.  -- Dieter Muller
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python