Caldera brings a different take to Linux. Linux has been known as geekware because you really had to be into operating systems to know and appreciate its features. Caldera is adapting Linux to the business needs, trying to make a product that is easier to install, easier to run, and easier to use. Caldera is also putting a graphical face on Linux, as opposed to the text editor approach of some other distributions.

Caldera is also selecting the best Linux modules from the many developers working with it, and will bundle those with their package. At times Caldera rewrites key elements of the operating system to make them easier to use, and have contributed that code to the open source project. For instance, the Linux Installation Wizard (LIZARD) installs Linux on your computer. Caldera wrote COAS, Caldera's Open Administration System, a graphical interface for setting parameters within your system. Then they added to their distribution third party packages to let you do productive work immediately. And finally, they tested it as one integrated system, put it together as a professional package, and are bringing it to the market.

The aim is to avoid the problem widely considered to have relegated Unix to a small portion of the server market: too many divergent and incompatible versions Linus himself tightly controls the kernel, which is the base of the operating system, and set up a Linux standard committee that develops standards so that there is some uniformity to the way Linux is being developed. And even though there are many companies that distribute Linux, each company's operating system is compatible with every other company's.

Caldera has two products. "One is open Linux 2.3, which is about to be replaced with 2.4. This is our desktop, or end user, or home version of Linux. The list price that you will find on the shelf has been $49.95; I don't know if they will continue that in 2.4. Our users group price is $25, and we do not have copies of this today, but if you are interested in ordering this, we expect to be able to ship these to you within the next few days, and you will have the very latest release."

Caldera also recently introduced its open Linux e-server, which is a version of Linux tuned and especially set up to be a server. The list price is $199.

In response to a question about running Windows applications under Linux, Gene mentioned WINE, a windows emulator, that allows running many Windows programs, and VM ware, a virtual machine that allows you to run an entire Windows operating system and all of its applications under Linux.

Caldera also offers Linux services. There are world-wide reseller channels so that no matter where you are, you probably have a Caldera reseller in the area. They bring Linux consulting to businesses. Education and training centers are being set up, not just to teach Linux from Caldera, but also to teach Linux in general "so that you can become a certified Linux engineer." And Caldera is one of the founding sponsors of the Linux Professional Institute, which is the group that certifies the Linux specialty.

Caldera started as the Linux team within Novell, developing the Linux interface for Novell's LAN Server. It was spun off as a separate company by Ray Noodra, CEO of Novell, and focuses exclusively on Novell. However, Caldera also bought the rights to DR-DOS, the DOS originally published by Digital Research, and sued a certain large company based in Redmond over alleged monopolistic practices. The suit was settled, but terms were not released.

First Gene then started out organizing the hard drive. When a lot of us bought our computer systems, they came with one large C partition installed because that is the way the manufacturer set it up. In that partition was the operating system, some applications and a lot of other stuff. This setup is not the best performer, nor the most efficient, nor the safest environment. It's just the cheapest and easiest way.

Gene gave suggestions to spark ideas about how we might like to re-do our systems:

Suggestion #1. Everyone should have two physical hard drives. The second hard drive provides another read-write head, will increase the performance of your system. It is a lot safer to have two drives so that you can back up information from one to the other. You've got a lot more organizational choices, and hard drives are inexpensive.

Suggestion #2. The original file system we all used was the very inefficient FAT file system. Microsoft has replaced it with the FAT 32 file system, which is more efficient, allows larger partitions, and has the latest technology. If your hard drive still has the old FAT system, you can use Partition Magic's tools to convert your partitions, and more important, you need an operating system that can handle FAT 32. Windows 2000 has FAT 32 support, as do Windows 98 and Windows 95B (but not the earlier versions of Windows 95).

Suggestion #3. This has to do with operating systems. On your hard drive, there are two types of partitions: primary partitions and logical partitions. As a rule of thumb, the primary partition should contain just the operating system, and everything else should be put in logical partitions.

Why? It allows you to do some interesting things with the operating system. For instance, you may want to try out a new operating system, like Linux. Don't disturb your current Windows 98 system, but set up another primary partition and install Linux in that one. With Partition Magic, utility called Boot Magic lets you quickly switch between operating systems. If you have your data files and your applications stored in other partitions, you can actually share some of those data files between the two operating systems.

Windows 2000 is now available. If you want to try it out, put it in a separate partition rather than installing it on top of your Windows 98 or Windows NT 4 partition.

Suggestion #4. A lot of us have hard drives full of "junk", to put it nicely. Gene bet that everyone here has at least one program on their hard drive that they have never tried out. Why not delete them? A lot of us have freezes and those blue screens of death because we've got so much garbage added to our systems. Gene then suggested leaving the old operating system in place, instead setting up a second primary partition with a new version of Windows. With the new operating system, you install those applications that you use every day, or at least several times a week. Leave everything else in the problem version, the old version. You can switch between them. When you are running your production or clean version, your system is not going to go down nearly as often. It will be a very lean, tightly organized system with the very latest code. If you download something from the Internet or want to try out a new software package, don't put it in the clean partition. Use the old partition to try it out. If you end up using the program all the time, install it in the good partition too.

Suggestion #5. All your application files should be in a separate partition from the operating system. Partition Magic has a utility that can move applications currently on your operating partition. Everything works better, and one advantage of doing this is that defragging your drive will go much faster because the program files never change, only the data files.

Once your data files are separated from the applications, only back up those. Your backups will be quicker and easier.

Suggestion #6. Create backup partitions on each of your hard drives. Hard drives are very efficient, very inexpensive, very fast. You can automate a lot of your backup operations if you use hard drives for part of that. Of course, you will back up a lot more frequently if the process is easier. Here's a suggested organization: Two physical hard drives are recommended. On the first physical hard drive, you have one primary partition for each operating system that you are going to run. On the second hard drive, don't set up a primary partition. Don't put a primary partition on that second hard drive and it won't grab the D: designation-all your partitions will stay with the letters you set up. And because they have different read-write heads, the performance of your system will increase slightly.

Now you have two backup areas, one on each hard drive. How should you use those back up areas? You can back up your apps partition and your data partition in the first hard drive's backup area. Then you can back up these operating systems in the second hard drive's backup area. If either one of those hard drives should go down, you simply pull it out, put in a new hard drive, and restore that hard drive from the other hard drive's backup area.

PowerQuest now detects and automatically repairs some common errors made by computer companies. Version 5 of Partition Magic has dozens of small changes and improvements.

At this point, Gene took a quick look at it. It still runs as a Windows 95, Windows NT, or a DOS application. He has two hard drives on his laptop, one 3 Gigabytes and one 2 Gigabytes. The 3 GB drive has two primary partitions, one for Windows 95 and the other for Linux. He also has a small primary partition that is a swap space for Linux, which is not being actively used now.

Gene then demonstrated several operations. He created a new temp partition, and then later merged it back in. He created a new partition wizard on the second hard drive. It asked if he wanted to install an operating system. He didn't since those are all on the first hard drive. Which file system did he want to use? He could select EXT2 for Linux or MTFS or FAT 32, which is preferred for us Windows users, but he left it at FAT 16. Did he want a primary partition on that second drive? No. He made them all logical. Then he needed to select where to put it. He left it at the end so that it would not disturb the drive letters of the others.

The wizard then asked where he wanted to take the space from to create that partition. He took it from a large backup area. Clicking on "next" gave a default amount of space and let him label that partition. Before reducing the size of this backup partition to the desired level, it left space to create the temp partition. Clicking on "finish" showed it as being part of the hard drive, but in reality it was still a pending operation. Those two operations remained pending. He could either discard those changes or continue and apply them to the hard drive.

Another possible change he showed was resizing the applications partition. He did so with the "resize wizard", by telling it where he wanted to take space from (the data partition, for example) to increase the size of the apps partition. Again, the operation was pending; he hadn't changed anything yet on the hard drive. He decided to make one more change, to merge a couple of partitions. To do so, he brought up a new wizard to merge the contents of the temp partition into the backup partition, because they might have common files with the same name, and then put them all in a special folder called "temp"; he then converted it to FAT 32 at the same time. They were merged, or would be merged, all into one large partition. Seven operations were pending. He could either discard or apply any of those changes. He then applied the changes. It took 20 seconds.

He pointed out, however, that if you're going to make changes to your system, it will take longer because you are likely to have a lot of files in your partitions. Each of those 7 steps may take 10 or 15 minutes.

The Magic Mover utility that comes with Partition Magic can move your applications from one partition to another. It updates the registry, updates all the shortcuts, updates the system files, the config.sys, autoexc.bat, sys.ini, and win.ini files.

A second approach is the cross backup Gene described earlier: leave both hard drives in the system and back up regularly to the other. But there is a potential problem with this approach. They could both go down at once. Even with two hard drives, you need to periodically put that information on some removable medium, like a recordable CD. Drive Image is the product that performs both of these backups.

One last product is for monitoring system failures: Second Chance. This is for when your system freezes up. It usually occurs because of incompatible software or some viruses. PowerQuest has a product that restores the system. It regularly checks the system at certain points points. Between these check points, it monitors all changes to your partitions and saves all of the deleted or changed files. Second Chance can then put your system back the way it was at any of the check points.

One nice feature is that you can sit down at the beginning of the year, create greeting cards or birthday cards for anyone you want, then put a date on them. When that date comes up they will be printed out and mailed.

Gene arranged with Amazing Mail to give everyone a free set of five cards they could create.