The cost of entry to the riches of GNU/Linux software has usually been in expertise rather than in money.
Experts can download the lot for nothing from the Net. The rest of us pay companies such as Red Hat, Caldera or Suse, £30 to £50 for a package of disks and manual that offers some hand-holding.
Either way, there's an awful lot more bang for your buck than with commercial software. But the installation process will also demand information about IRQs, DMAs, primary partitions and refresh rates - things that most people would rather not know about.
Corel aims to change all this, with a Linux distribution based on the popular Debian version that is intended to be easier to install and run than any before. The finished product is due for release at the end of the year, and trying out this pre-release version shows that it certainly offers the possibility of much simpler installation.
After inserting the CD-Rom it took about four mouse clicks for Corel Linux to take over the hard drive, install itself and bring up the Windows-like KDE desktop. (This final step of a Linux installation - getting the graphical desktop running - often causes more grief and muttered bad language than any other.) Mind you, this was for the basic setup. An attempt to run the other option, for a full development system, just wouldn't fly on the PC it was tested on.
The one that worked is a beta version and lacked many features planned for the final cut. There was still lots to see, though, including the set of tools and toys built into IT>KDE and the full-featured word-processor Word Perfect. If the ease of use shown in this beta can be extended to the full release then Corel will have made Linux much more accessible to users.