Xandros Desktop 1.0

Journal heironymouscoward's Journal: Xandros Desktop 1.0 4

Journal by heironymouscoward on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @05:03AM

There is only one serious problem with Xandros, and I'll get to that.

I'm not a Linux guru, despite having used it for a long time. I've installed perhaps twenty PCs with various distributions, starting with a Yggdrasil CDROM sometime in the 90's. It was a solid installation that did exactly what I needed: act as a server on which I could compile and test my free software tools. Even then, the fact that I could load a PC with free software capable of acting as a full development workstation for my C code... it seems banal now, but those were the days when compilers were big business.

Over the years I've tended to delegate Linux installs to younger, nimbler minds. I've admired how they played with disk tables, network configurations, not to mention loadable modules, and darker magics which my mind was quick to erase.

Then, last week, I found myself faced with four PCs to install, two for family members, two for new colleagues. A couple of decrepit workstations, which we bought in 2000, barely able to boot without pausing for breath. And a couple of notebooks, Austrian boxes built from desktop components, so cheap and nasty that out of an original four, only two survived more than a year, and on one of those the display will only work after a good hour of warming up.

My users have simple needs: browsing, office. Linux, yes, with OpenOffice.org, which we all use here. My mind waters at the prospect of desktops with no malware. No trojans, no Kazaa, no porn dialers... YES! We have been eliminating our Windows desktops, but each new install has been an adventure in itself.

Of course, I wanted to install Debian, there is no other Linux than Debian, as my sysadmin has told me many times. "Don't even think it..." Seeing how he can manage several dozen servers with just the lightest of touches, I have to agree.

Debian... now, I'd bought Lindows, which is based on Debian, a year or so ago, and it is really a cute package. People will mock it, but Lindows does so many things right that it's a kind of jealous mocking, "hey, why can't I download it for free, huh?" Lindows installs incredibly quickly and efficiently. None of that sick "and now you will configure your X display" nonsense.

But I'd already tried to install Lindows on one of the old boxes, and it had ground to a dead halt, apparently failing to detect the CD on reboot. So that was out.

Into my hand slipped a CD marked "Xandros Linux Desktop 1.0". I inserted it, booted, and up came a nice install screen. Click, yes, agree, click, root password, yes take over entire disk, add one or two users, OK...

I installed the two old boxes and plugged them into the wall, and clicked Mozilla, fine. Clicked the File Manager and found myself in a fantastic file manager. "Not standard Linux, surely?" Clicked on the Xandros Networks icon and found something like Lindows' click'n'run, simple installation of packages. Underneath that, it's just apt-get, so when I opened a shell window and did "apt-get upgrade", 90 Mb of updates installed themselves onto the PC. Excellent!

The notebooks were a little more troublesome: the in-built network card just would not detect, some kind of IRQ conflict. I thought about installing a Windows just to determine the actual IRQ settings, but the idea just made me twitch like the mad inspector in the Pink Panther, and when I spotted a couple of unused network PCMCIA cards, I slapped them in and held my breath. Xandros detected them, reconfigured the network, and the notebooks were online.

What's great about Xandros?

1. It's Debian, which is the standard for excellent Linux distributions (so says my sysadmin, and he is never, ever wrong).

2. It has near flawless hardware detection, and does smart things with the information it gets. I did not have to change a single setting to get a fully working and almost optimally-tuned system. OK, I did go and change the color depth to 24bit instead of 16bit. That was _it_. I have never - ever - seen an OS that did such a good job, period.

3. Excellent file manager, just excellent.

4. Includes everything I wanted, and not a lot of extra junk.

5. Pretty, but not garish. Lindows, sorry, you should have chosen something else than XP as your role model. Xandros is classy and elegant, something you'd be proud to install for a client or friend.

6. Most administration and configuration works from the GUI. You can of course do the normal stuff from the command-line, but it seems kind of silly.

I did not try to Crossover office functions: apparently these let you install MS Office, use MSIE plugins in Mozilla, and let you install TrueType fonts. Honestly, we switched to OOo some time ago, and the fonts in Xandros look just fine.

There is one minor problem with Xandros, a problem shared with all Debian distributions: you have to be patient for new releases of software. For instance, I generally use OOo1.1, with its wonderfully useful "Export to PDF" feature. I could install this version on Xandros, but it would break the apt-get model. So I'm sitting with OOo1.0 and wondering whether I will crack and install OOo1.1 manually, or find some other way to produce PDFs on the one notebook that has to be able to do this.

Now the real problem with Xandros. When I installed it, I did not even realise it was commercial software. Sure, it has a license agreement, but does anyone actually read these? Certainly not on a Linux distro. Only when I went to the Internet to read about this obscure but interesting package did I realize that it was actually a $99 product, an inheritor of Corel Linux, which I'd installed in 1999 from a CD received from the Corel team themselves in the Bazaar expo in NYC.

In the meantime I've bought five copies of Xandros, which will arrive sometime in the next few days.

The problem: Xandros is a truly excellent product, and easily worth the $99 if you need MS Office support, or $40 if you can live without it. But it can only spread by word of mouth. And this means people installing it, trying it, and telling their friends about it. It was sheer luck that an (illegal) copy of this fell into my hands just when I needed it, but how can Xandros grow without some kind of instant gratification model?

Xandros should make the basic version (without the commercial software) available for free download. This is absolutely necessary, and it will not hurt their revenue one bit. Those of us who run OOo will admire Xandros and tell our friends and colleagues about it, and those who need MSOffice support will buy the commercial version. Why would you buy Crossover Office separately when it just means more installation work? No, get Xandros, it is all there for the same price and much fewer headaches.

Anyhow, Xandros took about one week to conquer our company: it provides what we've been wanting since we decided to migrate to Linux: a Debian based distro that is trivial to install and administrate, but is easy for naive users to work on. We can stop the business of boot-strapping Debian installs from diskette. We can stop worrying about what software people will install.

One of those old PCs is for my brother-in-law, who at 17, has only ever used a PC in cybershops, common in Africa and Europe. After a couple of days with Xandros, I asked him how it was going. He said, "nothing special, it works, sure".

That says it all.

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