Better known in China and Japan than in the West, Victory Technologies' TurboLinux Workstation 4.0 is beginning to gain a worldwide following. It's a low-cost distribution of the Linux 2.2.12 with few frills. Regardless, it's easy to set up TurboLinux Workstation for a variety of common applications (as a file server, for example), and users will be pleased by the distribution's seemingly faster-than-average performance. It's also easy to customize TurboLinux Workstation, like any Linux box, with lots of software you can download from the Internet. Installation of TurboLinux Workstation is smooth and very fast (less than 15 minutes for a midrange set of features). Within the installation, you can choose to select from a series of options, and option sets range in size from 100 MB to 800 MB, without source code. One drawback: the installation routine's character-based interface and sometimes goofy keyboard commands fall short of the slick, clickable interfaces that other Linux distributions boast. The installation routine doesn't sugarcoat Linux, either; you have to know what kind of video card you have, for example, and how much video memory it contains.
If you like having lots of flexibility in your installations, you'll be happy. On the other hand, if you'd prefer to have everything take care of itself and not bother you for details, you'll be happier with a friendlier version of Linux. (Corel Linux OS is a good example.) The installation routine also unnecessarily obfuscates the process of setting up a multiple-boot situation. It's easy to lose the ability to boot to your existing operating systems if you're trying to install TurboLinux as a second or third system, so be careful and take lots of notes during configuration if that's your goal.
Once you've installed TurboLinux Workstation, you'll be pleased by its speed of execution under XFree86 3.3.5. Speaking unscientifically, TurboLinux Workstation seems slightly faster than Red Hat Linux and other distributions. What Victory Technologies has done to bring about this performance boost isn't clear, but it's welcome in any case.
If you care to configure it yourself, this product ships with the Gnome environment. It also comes with many developers' tools, including (of all things) a Fortran 77 compiler!
If you're comfortable installing and using TurboLinux Workstation, you'll probably also be comfortable downloading Linux straight from the network. If having the CD-ROMs is worth it to you (and it probably is, if you don't have a fast Internet connection), this product is a good choice. Otherwise, look at more feature-rich Linux variants. --David Wall
