Corel Road Show 2000

["R.G. Mayhue" <rgmayhue@serenesoftware.com>]

I attended the Corel Road Show 2000 at the Tampa Hilton Westshore last 
night and came away fairly impressed with what Corel has done with the 
KDE desktop. They really have come up with a distro that most anybody 
can install and use. 

The installer has is only four screens for the standard default 
install. All the hardware on the system is detected and the proper 
drivers are installed. The user is not asked for any infomation 
reguarding the system configuration. Networking, PPP and any other 
needed configuration is done using the "control panel" utilizing some 
addtional modules (wizards) written by Corel for the distro.

This is okay if you initially want to be limited to what Corel provides 
you in the standard download addtion. No Gnome, other window managers, 
etc..., although the package manager handles Debian packages as well as 
RPMS.

What was REALLY impressive was the Corel Office 2000 Suite. These apps 
ARE suite! I was very impressed with preformance of these applications 
running on Linux. Word Perfect 9 is more impressive than any of the MS 
tools I have seen to date. After clicking on any paragraph in an open 
document, hovering the mouse over the dropdown font menu listing 
changes the font on the page in "real time" as you navigate the 
listing! Really neat stuff!

They gave everyone that attended a copy of the download version of the 
distro.

Anyone migrating from Windows to Linux would be at home with this one. 
And that is exactly what they were shooting for!

--
R.G. Mayhue