Red Hat 6.2 vs. Caldera 2.4 eDesktop

Eric Lee Green

1. Introductions

It is rare that Linux distributions rev on almost the same day, but that's what happened with Red Hat 6.2 and Caldera 2.4. Both are tasty, but in different ways. Having tired of reading shallow distribution reviews by people who have no idea of the enterprise environment, I decided to remedy that situation. In this article I attempt to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly of each one, and which one you might want to use in various situations.

2. Server Features

2.1 Installers

Both Red Hat and Caldera now default to GUI installers. These installers are noticeably slower than the old character-based installers were. Both took approximately 20 minutes on the test machine, an Athlon 500 with 64mb of RAM and a 14gb 7200RPM IDE hard drive. An install of TurboLinux 6.0, using a derivative of the old (non-GUI) Red Hat installer, took half the time on the same hardware

Both installers have a similar feature set, allowing you to partition the disk, pick packages, install them, and do basic system and network configuration tasks. Thus I will point out the differences.

Red Hat has these notable features that Caldera doesn't have:

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Ability to easily select NIS for password authentication: This is a checkbox under the Red Hat installer. This feature makes Red Hat a ``plug and play'' OS for Unix-based networks that use NIS as their source of UID's and passwords. Installing Red Hat Linux on such a network requires only mounting the /usr/local and /home partitions off of the appropriate NFS server after install.

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A 'Use FDISK' button for the disk partitioning. If you have special disk partitioning needs (e.g., if you're running a triple-boot system with Windows and OpenBSD, or otherwise running a non-standard setup), Red Hat's GUI installer now gives you the flexibility to handle that.

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Ability to create a small /boot partition at the start of the disk and install the boot sector there. Caldera only allows installing the boot sector on the MBR or on the actual '/' partition (which does not help if the '/' partition is located above the 1024-cylinder boundary, a common occurance with today's larger hard drives).

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Ability to configure the system while software is installing. Caldera's installer multitasks. Red Hat's doesn't.

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Ability to configure sound. Red Hat has an excellent sound configuration tool, ``sndconfig''. For some bizarre reason, they do not include it as part of the installation process. Caldera has no similar sound configuration program, but their Lizard does include the ability to detect certain PCI or Plug'n'Play sound cards.

One final note is support for remote printers. Most modern high-speed printers include Ethernet modules that accept Berkeley 'lpd' protocol. Red Hat's printer configuration tool properly configures such printers, including the print filter needed to convert plain text to Postscript (if necessary). Caldera's printer configuration tool in 'lizard' does not include such a capability, but, rather haughtily, informs you ``You can't do filters on remote printers.'' This is not a factor of the underlying print spooler software. Caldera includes LPRng, which has the capability to do filters for remote printers - we use it in-house to drive JetDirect modules (LPRng is inherently more reliable than Red Hat's rather hacked-up port of the FreeBSD 'lpd' program, thus we installed LPRng in place of Red Hat's 'lpd' on our corporate print server). Unfortunately, Caldera has chosen not to take advantage of that capability. To be fair, they probably don't know the capability exists - the older port of the BSD 'lpd' program that Caldera once used did not have that capability. But it is extremely important in the enterprise environment, where networked high-speed printers are the norm, and it is quite disappointing that Caldera did not notice that they needed such capability. That is the kind of careless ignorance of the needs of enterprise environments that does not help a company's reputation.

Both Red Hat and Caldera eDesktop include the ability to configure a network interface dynamically using DHCP. Sadly, neither allows setting the system name transmitted by the DHCP client, a capability which is required by most cable Internet providers. Red Hat's DHCP client daemon can be hand-configured to send such a name by doing a manual entry into the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 script. I have not yet found a way to do this with eDesktop.

2.2 System Configuration Tools

Once the system is configured, both distributions include a variety of GUI-oriented tools for configuring it. Both systems have their system configuration and administration tools divided between two different subsystems. Parts of their installer can also be invoked separately, but most people will have done that configuration at install time and will never need to go back to that stage.

Red Hat has two basic tool kits used to administer their system: a set of Python/TK based tools in their ``Control Panel'', and a set of multi-display-capable tools in their ``Linuxconf''. ``Linuxconf'' also has 'curses' (console) and web-enabled front ends. Red Hat continues to increase the range of subsystems that 'linuxconf is capable of configuring, though three subsystems are notably missing: PAM, OpenLDAP, and Kerberos 5. More on that later.

Caldera has two basic tool kits used to administer their system: a set of Python-based tools in their ``COAS'' system, and a web-based tool called 'webmin'. COAS remains a promising but unfinished set of tools, that basically remains unchanged since Caldera 2.3 due to the loss of its prime mover to Lineo when Caldera split into embedded and enterprise divisions. 'webmin' is a promising toolkit that looks like it may finally win the system configuration wars for Caldera if Caldera makes a long-term commitment to its further improvement.

Both sets of system configuration tools configure a similar set of services - web, FTP, DHCP, DNS, system startup, etc. Caldera's 'webmin' also can be used to configure the Majordomo mailing list server, Squid proxy cache, and the MySQL database server. Red Hat's 'linuxconf' has no similar capability. As with Red Hat, Caldera does not include a GUI configuration tool for PAM or OpenLDAP that would allow easily using an enterprise network directory as the source of user authentication data. eDesktop 2.4's feature set was finalized before the recent relaxation in crypto export regulations, so eDesktop 2.4 does not include Kerberos 5.

2.3 Web Features

Both Red Hat and Caldera include a variety of software with their distribution that can be used to create database-enabled web sites. Caldera includes MySQL 3.22, a lightweight semi-commercial database whose multi-threaded design and light footprint make it excellent for the transient environment of the World Wide Web. Red Hat includes PostGreSQL 6.5.3, a more substantial feature-filled totally free (BSD-license) database which, however, takes a long time to initiate connections due to its larger footprint and its use of processes rather than threads for connections. PostGreSQL is extremely slow in CGI environments. It is somewhat faster (though still no speed demon) when the web language is embedded in the web server, using mod_perl or mod_php3, and can thus maintain semi-persistent connections. MySQL is fast, period, no matter how you connect to it, though it lacks some features such as transactions and triggers that are of use in many applications.

Red Hat includes Postgres support within all languages commonly used on the World Wide Web: Perl, Python, TCL, and PHP3. I was unable to verify whether MySQL support was provided for Perl, TCL, or PHP3 for Caldera 2.4 eDesktop. I did verify that MySQL support was not provided for Python on Caldera eDesktop.

Caldera includes a couple of modules for Apache which are of interest to many people: mod_dav, and mod_roaming. mod_dav allows using the uploading feature used for Microsoft ``web folders''. mod_roaming allows you to set up Apache to serve as a Netscape roaming server, thus allowing you to use a common bookmarks and cookie file everywhere. Caldera also includes the ``webalizer'', which creates web statistics from your web files.

2.4 Other Internet Services

Both Red Hat and Caldera include 'sendmail' for SMTP services and 'procmail' for mail delivery/mail filtering services. Caldera also includes the 'majordomo' mailing list processor and a 'webmin' module for managing it.

Other services that they provide in common include:

ISC DHCP, INN news server, wuftp FTP server, Samba server for Windows file and print sharing, BIND8 domain name server, NIS+ server, and NFS server.

Red Hat uses their own hacked version of the FreeBSD 'lpd' print server program. This version includes the ability to use print filters for remote print spools, which is important in the enterprise print environment where network-attached printers are the norm.

Caldera uses the much-more-robust LPRng print server program, which was written as a replacement for the old BSD 'lpd' program (of which Red Hat's 'lpd' is a derivative) some years back. LPRng has the ability to use print filters for remote print spools (internally, we replaced Red Hat's 'lpd' with LPRng due to its better stability), but Caldera's printer configuration tools refuse to configure said print filters.

2.5 Enterprise Directory Features

Red Hat 6.2 includes NIS+, OpenLDAP, and Kerberos 5, along with the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) to support them. Red Hat includes both the server and client for these directory protocols. Caldera, as mentioned previously, does not include Kerberos 5 as part of eDesktop because eDesktop's feature set was finalized prior to the recent relaxing of crypto regulations.

At install time Red Hat asks you whether you are using a NIS server, and if so, its domain and (optionally) map server. You can also adjust these within 'linuxconf' if necessary.

Caldera offers no such ability. You must manually edit the 'yp.conf' file and turn on the 'ypbind' service. This is not a big deal, however. NIS is well supported on Linux and the appropriate NIS ``HOWTO'' applies.

Neither Red Hat nor Caldera offers the ability to set up and configure an OpenLDAP server via a user-friendly interface. Red Hat does have the beginnings of a GNOME-based Kerberos server configuration tool, but it is still somewhat rudimentary. Neither Red Hat nor Caldera offers the ability to easily configure the system (via a user-friendly front end to PAM) to get its password and user information via OpenLDAP or Kerberos. This undoubtedly will be the next frontier for Linux. Both Red Hat and Caldera now offer OpenLDAP as a standard part of their distribution. Hopefully in the future they will actually make it useful for something besides a marketing checkbox.

2.6 File and Print Services

Both Caldera 2.4 and Red Hat 6.2 provide Samba (Windows file and print sharing), NFS, and 'lpd' printer services. Caldera loses on the print services side because Caldera's printer configuration tool refuses to properly configure filters for network-attached printers. Most large enterprise-class laser printers are network attached via ``JetDirect'' or similar ethernet adaptors, and require any filtering to be done at the source end. Caldera's default tools won't do that.

Caldera supposedly provides superior Novell file and print connectivity. Unfortunately, I did not have a Novell network handy to test this ability. Given Caldera's close relationship with Novell, both physically (within a few miles of each other) and spiritually (many Caldera employees are ex-Novell employees), it is likely that Caldera is preferable to Red Hat if you wish to interact in a Novell environment.

3. Desktop Features

3.1 User Interface

Caldera is a straight ``K'' Desktop Environment fan. They include no GNOME libraries or GNOME applications.

Red Hat is a big fan of GNOME. They include KDE, but it is not their primary user interface.

KDE remains the more user-friendly of the two user interfaces. It is also noticeably faster in everyday use. For most people, however, the choice of user interface is going to be less important than the question, ``will program 'foo' run on this distribution?''. Sadly, due to lack of the GNOME libraries, that answer is ``No'' for Caldera eDesktop for many programs of interest.

3.2 Internet applications

eDesktop's big claim to fame is that they provide Netscape pre-configured with all the plugins you'd ever want - Shockwave, 'xswallow' (to allow viewing PDF and Postscript as part of your browser window), mp3, RealAudio, etc. Unfortunately, Real released a new version of the RealPlayer soon after Caldera went to gold with eDesktop. Fortunately, this new version works well on eDesktop. You must, however, remove the existing RealPlayer '.rpm' file before installing the new one. If you use the Red Hat version of the RealPlayer on eDesktop, you must also provide a symbolic link prior to the install between /usr/lib/netscape and /opt/netscape/communicator (i.e., 'ln -s /opt/netscape/communicator /usr/lib/netscape'). Otherwise the plugin files are placed in the wrong location.

Caldera eDesktop also includes the Acrobat Reader, which displays the .pdf files which have become the standard way of distributing technical documentation on the World Wide Web, as well as mp3 players etc. In general, I have not found any plugin or application of general Internet use that eDesktop does not come with already. The only downside I've found is that the version of Netscape that comes with eDesktop appears to be somewhat shaky - sometimes when I close a window, the entire browser crashes and ``goes away''. Netscape appears to be slightly more stable on Red Hat 6.2, though Netscape Communicator has never been accused of being stable on any operating system.

Configuring a Red Hat system to include the Internet applications and features of Caldera eDesktop is a major task, involving hunting down and installing plugins from a variety of web sites and downloading third party applications from a variety of sites. Caldera eDesktop thus is clearly superior as an Internet client platform.

3.3 Desktop Applications

Caldera clearly wins in this category also. Caldera provides the 'klyx' text processor, 'xemacs' programmer's text editor, and Caldera Graphics Cameleo Light drawing program as part of their distribution, as well as a huge variety of KDE tools. SANE scanner support, and 'xcdroast' for CD-writing, provide support for popular end-user devices. Due to the space overhead of supporting both GNOME and KDE, and desire to provide the entire distribution on a single CD-ROM, the desktop applications provided by Red Hat are more limited. 'gnumetric' is the only one of any significance.

It is important to remember, however, that Red Hat also has their 'PowerTools' product which provides a number of applications provided as part of Caldera eDesktop. For example, 'klyx', 'xemacs', and 'xcdroast' are all available off of Red Hat's 'Power Tools' disk. Caldera has no such 'add on' product, and also lacks the huge variety of contributed software that can be downloaded from Red Hat's FTP site.

3.4 Encryption and Security

Red Hat. By a landslide. Red Hat includes GNU Privacy Guard as a standard part of their distribution now, and also includes Kerberos. If your network is Kerberized, you can then get secure authentication via Kerberos rather than sending password information in plain text over the network. Kerberos also includes the ability to perform encrypted FTP and telnet.

OpenSSH offers some of the same capabilities, but neither distribution includes it because currently OpenSSH is illegal to distribute within the borders of the United States. In November the U.S. patent on RSA public key encryption expires, thus making OpenSSH and ApacheSSL (the free version, rather than the pricey for-pay licensed version linked against RSA's library) legal to distribute within the boundaries of the United States. Hopefully OpenSSH and mod_ssl will become a standard part of both distributions at that time.

4. Technical Computing Features

4.1 Development Environment

A major market for Linux is as a software development workstation for scientific and technical applications. Both Caldera and Red Hat provide excellent development environments, but their focus is very different.

Caldera provides an excellent development environment for KDE and Java applications. Caldera eDesktop includes the 'kdevelop' package, which is a Visual-Studio-like integrated development environment for KDE applications. eDesktop also includes the 'ddd' display debugger, which is (in my opinion) the best GUI developer for Linux. Installing 'ddd' off of the PowerTools CD is one of the first things I do after installing Red Hat Linux.

Caldera provides the latest Java2 JDK from Sun as a standard part of their distribution. This allows using the free Java development environments from Sun and Borland/Imprise without having to download extra software (other than the development environments themselves, of course). eDesktop is thus set up well to be a Java development workstation. Hopefully Caldera will, in the future, attempt to license one of those Java development environments for inclusion in eDesktop.

Caldera's weakness here is that it cannot be used to develop GNOME-compliant applications, due to its lack of GNOME libraries. See the paragraph on Red Hat below for why that may be of importance in the future.

Red Hat does not provide kdevelop or a modern Java implementation. What Red Hat provides is an excellent GNOME development environment. For example, if, like myself, you are a fan of the Python programming language because of its sensible syntax and well-designed object-oriented feature set, you will find that you can build a GUI user interface using GLADE (a GNOME XML-based UI builder), save the resulting XML to a file, then use the provided py_Glade() interface to display said interface and interact with end users. Similarly, Python has also been provided with a gtk+ interface library if you desire to program the graphics toolkit directly without the overhead of XML.

Red Hat, then, provides an excellent development environment for GTK+ and GNOME applications, while Caldera focuses on KDE and Java development. Red Hat arguably does a better job of implementing their focus, extending the GTK+ and GNOME support to all of the major languages available in their distribution. The lack of a Java builder for eDesktop prevents Caldera from attaining similar perfection in their Java focus. However, none of that is relevant if you wish to build a GNOME application on Caldera (which is very difficult), or wish to build a Java2 application on Red Hat (easier than doing GNOME on Caldera, but not by much).

Which one provides the better development environment, in other words, depends upon what you're developing.

4.2 Scientific Clustering

Red Hat. By a landslide. They provide all the PVM etc. tools used for Beowulf clustering, and include cluster management tools to make the job much easier. They also provide scientific visualization tools that could be of use in many scientific clustering type applications.

5. Miscellaneous

5.1 Kernel features

Both Red Hat and Caldera have a long history of providing their own custom kernels. Due to Alan Cox being hired by Red Hat, Red Hat's kernels are a lot less custom than they used to be.

Red Hat provides several different kernels. They provide an SMP (multi-processor) and non-SMP kernel, in i386, Pentium, and Pentium II formats. The non-SMP kernel includes APM power management support so that, e.g., if you shut down a laptop, it will automagically turn off at the end of the shutdown sequence.

eDesktop, by contrast, includes far more customization. The eDesktop kernel is an all-in-one beasty that comes with SMP support built in but disablable by LILO-time command line options. There is no power management support, making it less suited for laptops. It does, however, feature a Streams support module, which is important because Caldera's Netware for Linux product requires Streams support in order to properly function.

For my purposes, the more-flexible Red Hat approach worked better. The only complaint I had about the Red Hat kernel was that I had to re-compile it with IDE-CDROM as a module in order to use an IDE CD burner. The Caldera kernel, on the other hand, is rather annoying when installed on a laptop, though it's fine on a desktop.

5.2 Automated Software Updates

As with Windows 98 and Mandrake 6.1 and up, Red Hat Linux includes an automated OS update tool. Click on this guy and it automagically connects to Red Hat's FTP server and checks if any OS updates have been released since you last connected. If so, it presents a list of them, and you can then pick and choose which ones you wish to install.

Caldera eDesktop includes no such tool, as far as I can tell. This perhaps reflects the German origin of the base distribution - Internet access is very expensive in Germany due to a monopolistic national phone company, thus downloading software (even updates) over the Internet is not viewed as a viable thing to do. This is why SuSE Linux is a big seller in Germany - it eliminates the need to download software off of the Internet.

6. Discussion:

Both Caldera eDesktop 2.4 and Red Hat 6.2 have their strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully this discussion will help you decide which one is right for you.

If you are a big fan of the ``K'' Desktop Environment and looking for a Linux for browsing the Internet , building KDE applications, and/or building Java applications, eDesktop is the right one for you. The pre-configured web plugins and Java2 SDK make it an excellent choice, as does the inclusion of 'kdevelop'.

Caldera, however, has made some choices that make eDesktop unsuited for some uses. eDesktop cannot be used to develop GNOME applications (not without much pain anyhow). eDesktop is also useless as an enterprise print server, since the printer configuration system refuses to talk properly to networked-attached enterprise-class printers. Finally, it is harder to build web-enabled databases with eDesktop because not all provided web programming languages have been database-enabled. If, on the other hand, you wish to use Apache to display web pages developed elsewhere (using WebDAV), or if you wish to use it as a Netscape directory server (to access your bookmarks and cookies from anywhere), eDesktop comes set up to do that. Similarly, since eDesktop comes with majordomo, it's easy to set up a mailing list for you and a few friends without having to hunt down and set up and configure software from all over the web.

Where Red Hat shines is as a file, print, and general-purpose Internet server. Red Hat also co-exists more easily with other (non-Windows) operating systems due to the ability to use 'fdisk' to partition the disk, and tolerates large ( > 8gb ) hard drives better due to its willingness to put its boot sector on a small /boot partition. Red Hat Linux is also preferable if you are doing scientific clustering or GNOME application development.

As a general-purpose desktop, Caldera is excellent, while Red Hat requires installing software downloaded off the Internet or off of the PowerTools disk in order to make it an acceptable desktop. Still, Red Hat is quite usable as a desktop, and should not be ruled out for that. In particular, the automated software update tool adds a level of long-term security that Caldera currently does not offer.

Summary of summary: My recommendation is Caldera eDesktop as an Internet desktop or Java/KDE software development workstation and perhaps as a personal web server, Red Hat for the enterprise desktop, scientific applications, and general-purpose file, print, and Internet server.

CORRECTIONS

However, I stand by the other issues that were raised: Caldera's boot loader configuration remains less flexible than Red Hat's (in particular, you cannot place OpenLinux on a second hard drive while placing the boot sector on a bootable /boot partition on the first hard drive), and management of partitions on a machine with a lot of (non-Linux/non-Windows) partitions on it was not accomplishable from within their replacement for classic 'fdisk'. And some kind of power management may have been compiled into the kernel, but my laptop still doesn't turn off when I do "shutdown -h now" under eDesktop the way that it turned off when I did that with Red Hat.

7. About the author

Eric Lee Green (mailto:eric@estinc.com) is currently working as a software engineer for Enhanced Software Technologies, Inc., the makers of the 'BRU' backup software for Linux and Unix. In a previous life he was a network administrator and system administrator.

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