[Eug-lug] Xandros

[Bob Miller]

Anne got a new laptop for work yesterday.  It came with Windows XP
Home preinstalled.  She, of course, uses Linux.  She asked me to
install it for her.

Anne says her employer is standardizing on Xandros, so I decided to
give Xandros a shot.  This message describes my brief experieence with
Xandros.

Xandros is a commercial, Debian-based distro that positions itself as
non-geek friendly.  As Joseph knows, Xandros is the reincarnation of
Corel Linux.  Xandros is not free-as-in-speech, though there is an
evalution version that's free-as-in-beer.  So I downloaded the eval
version through bittorrent.  (Xandros charges $10 to download it from
their web server.  An interesting idea, which seems fine to me since
I'm familiar with bittorrent.  Soak the newbies. (-: )

Installing was a snap.  I answered about three questions: What is your
name?  Express install or custom?  Do you want to keep Windows?  and
the installer took it from there.  It split the disk to 50% Windows
and 50% Xandros and didn't offer to let me change that.  That's fine,
I guess.

This laptop, an HP Pavilion ZT-9000 (I think) has a wide screen of
1680x1050 pixels.  (Beautiful screen, BTW.)  Xandros came up at
1024x780.  All I had to do was right-click the desktop, select
"Properties", click the "Advanced" button, and select the screen's
actual resolution from a menu.  Compared to the hours-long XF86Config
hacking sessions I've gone through in the past, that was wonderfully
painless.  (Of course, I didn't think of trying the easy way until
after I'd looked at XF86Config for a bit.  D'oh!)

That was it for hardware configuration.  The built-in WiFi (Intel/Pro
Wiress 2200) doesn't have a working driver yet, and Xandros doesn't do
most ACPI functions.  But everything else -- sound, Ethernet, PCMCIA,
USB, etc., worked with no configuration.

Xandros does not use the word "root".  It's always "the administrator
account" and "the administrator password".  I like that.

The software is not particularly up to date.  The kernel is 2.4.X, the
X server is XFree86, OpenOffice is 1.1.0.  That's okay, I guess -- as
long as things work, they don't need to be cutting edge.  The version
of gaim available is too old to work with Yahoo -- no surprise there.
(Hey, if any of you you are Yahoo users, just give it up, okay?
They're clueless.)

Rather than give you 14 terminal emulators, 7 web browsers, 16 IRC
clients, and two ways to crack your eggs, Xandros has picked one app
from each category.  Those apps are:

	Desktop:      KDE
	Office Suite: OpenOffice
	Instant Mess: Instant Messaging (part of KDE?)
	Web Browser:  Opera

Xandros comes with Xandros Network, a browser-like application that
installs and removes software.  It only talks to Xandros' servers, If
you know the super-secret preference setting, you can also access
Xandros' Debian Woody archive and install packages from there.  So you
can install a few additional apps, for example, I installed Mozilla.
Firefox is not available.

More worrying to me is that Xandros Network offered me only three
security updates, and the oldest one was from last July, six months
ago.  Um, Debian has issued about 200 security advisories in that
time, is Xandros even tracking those?  I know, Xandros uses a small
subset of Debian's packages, but I still expect to see more than three
update in six months.  It is gross negligence to attach a computer
to the Internet with known vulnerabilities, so I am concerned.

Anyway, I was happy to give Anne a system ready to use after only ~4
hours' work.  (That time included setting up and updating Windows XP,
which took may be an hour.)  However, since it doesn't have the right
web browser (Firefox), doesn't have the right IM program, and has a
downrev OpenOffice, she's planning to install KNOPPIX today.

BTW, the current KNOPPIX (v3.7, 12/8/2004) still defaults to a 2.4
kernel and XFree86 too.  What's up with that?

-- 
Bob Miller                              K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com                     kbob at jogger-egg.com