TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

College Linux is a distro put out by (you guessed it) a college, whose name I forget but you can read my previous reviews to find out.  They have an interesting naming scheme for their releases; they're all Star Wars characters.  The last version I tried, 2.0 was dubbed Darth Vader.  This one is ObiWan.  However, considering the great amount of work it took to get this distro installed, padawans need not apply.

Install:

The install for College Linux has improved somewhat from the last release, notably because I was unable to partition my harddrives from within the installer of 2.0, and now cfdisk runs well.  That being said, the College Linux installer is one of the most piss-poor installers I have EVER tried, and that's including FreeBSD and Debian, which are both notoriously obtuse and difficult.

The install assumes that the user has a fair bit of knowledge of where Linux puts its kernel images and assumes the user knows how to operate the cfdisk command, which few newbies do. 

Once you have all that figured out it asks where you want your root and swap partitions, how you want to set up LILO (you do have an option NOT to install LILO, which is good) and then asks what partitions to which you want to install.

Throughout this process there are no back buttons, no arrow keys, no graphics of any kind (the whole installer is a green text mode window) and any mistakes cause you to have to CTRL+ALT+DELETE and reboot to start the whole process over. I am rather experienced at installing Linux and I found myself hard rebooting 5 times before I got it right. 

Package Selection:

Like some other distros that try to make Linux installs easier, College gives you no choice at all as to what it installs.  At least it's just a little over 1 gigabyte and not the 4GB behemoth that Redhat would be.

However, this kind of annoys me.  It also is based on Slackware, which is one of those love it or hate it scenarios.  Personally, the Slackware TGZ package management system is too much work for me.  Same for RPM.  However, Slackware-based distributions usually run very fast, so you just have to weigh what means more to you.

Most Annoying Feature:

The installer is probably College Linux's achilles heel. Many users, particularly newbies to Linux, can be and will be completely baffled and run off by the difficulty, ugliness, and prior knowledge requirements that this installer has.

My first impression of a distribution is formed as soon as I see an installer screen, and often times if I have to spend too much time just getting the INSTALLER to work, I give up entirely on the distro. This was the case with Slackware 8.x.

If the designers of College Linux want this to be a real "alternative OS" for their college students, they're going to have to make a much better installer for starters. 

Who's it best for?

I personally don't recommend College Linux at all, but if I were forced to choose who should try it, I'd say medium-experience Linux users who know their way around cfdisk and just want to try another flavor out for a while.

The long-term potential for using College Linux is very limited, since anyone who wants a Slackware-based distro would simply be better off installing Slackware itself, since their installer works much better (although it isn't any prettier) and since version 9.1 they've fixed a lot of the issues that were show-stoppers for systems like mine.