TurboLinux
Ease of installation
The textbased installation tool looks very much like a slightly customized version of the textbased Redhat installation tool. The questions are sometimes tricky to answer for a newcomer to Linux and people without basic knowledge about hardware. All choices are made from the keyboard, the mouse is only used when the graphical resolution in X is tested.
Setting up hardware
Mouse:It is possible to select a scroll mouse, but in order to get the scroll wheel working, it is necessary to make further modifications in XF86Config.
Network interface card:Turbolinux is the only distribution who makes a request to the DNS server for a domain name.
Graphics Adaptor: Autoprobes graphics adaptors, however it is needed to select the correct card based upon a list of supported cards.
Sound card: The soundcard is not configured during the installation process and the soundcard setup program 'Turbosoundcfg' has a very narrow selection of soundcards to choose from mainly SoundBlaster and SB-compatible. Does not support PnP and the configuration is done by typing I/O address, IRQ and DMA.
Selecting software
Selecting software to install is done by either choosing any of the preconfigured options or do a custom installation. The range of preconfigured options is very wide and the estimated size of each installation type is given:
* All-in-one-workstation
* Basic workstation
* Network workstation
* Development workstation
* Graphical workstation
* Graphical development workstation
* Custom
In this test the default All-in-one-workstation was chosen.
Ease of usage
The choice of applications from the desktop menus is the smallest of all the tested distributions (excluding Debian), and none of the Turbolinux specific tools has been included in the menus. There are no icons installed on the desktop as shortcuts to documentation or to (un)mount floppy/CDROM. The floppy drive is configured to read Linux formated diskettes only, making it difficult for fist time users with information on diskettes with another format. Neither the floppy or CDROM-drive is super- or automounted and the only user allowed to (un)mount is root, which also makes it harder for first time users.
Language support
TurboLinux support the following 9 languages:
* Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
* English (U.K. and American)
* French
* German
* Italian
* Japanese
* Korean
* Portuguese
* Spanish
This include localized language versions of the office suite StarOffice from Sun Microsystems as well as a localized version of the TurboLinux installer, disk partitioning utility and configuration utilities, among others.
Ease of maintenance
Software maintenance
Maintaining software can be done with the Turbolinux packagetool (turbopkg), which support both installing/upgrading from ftp sites and from CDROM/local harddrive. Unfortunately the tool can only update from Turbolinux approved mirrors and it is not possible to add a standard RedHat ftp mirror since the tool looks for a special Turbolinux header file. One positive thing about this is that all packages on the officially sites are build, tested and checked by Turbolinux, as the only one of the RPM based systems. The drawback is that the selection of packages on these sites are relatively narrow/small. If you want to install packages not included in the distribution or on the mirror sites, it is necessary to download the RPM-files first and then install them with the tool. When installing from CD or Harddrive, it scans for packages in a specified directory (and below) and then displays the information within the packages found.
Managing hardware
To (re)configure hardware Turbolinux has included all the standard textbased Redhat configurationtools only slightly changed (and renamed). Turbolinux has developed the hardware documentation tool 'Turbohw' which generates a list of detected hardware on the system and the retrieved info about every hardware piece. Supplying this hardware list when contacting the support service enhances the chance of quick problem solving.
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