Linked by Phil Hall on Thu 5th Dec 2002 00:35 UTC
I'm a long-time Windows user, but for years I've been searching for an intelligent alternative. Macs are actually a great choice, but have you priced them lately? I don't have two grand to spend for another system. I had been reading all the hoopla surrounding Xandros Desktop for a number of months and decided to take the plunge. I had been burned two times previously trying to install other Linux distributions. Their tech support was non-existent. I'm essentially working in a vacuum. When something has gone wrong in the past, I've found that I was on my own. 
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J.J wrote:
>Does Xondros or any other distro fully redetect HW each >and every boot, ie can the HD+OS be moved between entirely >different systems that are themselves ok with the distro? ----------------------------------
A while ago I installed Mandrake 8.2 and Win98 SE(dual boot) on an old Pentium PC I had. After playing with it for a while, I built a new Athlon XP 1600 PC, then swapped the old hard-drive (with both Mandrake 8.2/Win98 SE installs on it) into the new box.
Just for giggles, I powered it up without wiping the hard drive and re-installing. To my surprise, Mandrake 8.2 came up beautifully without any problems and ran perfectly. Remember, this was a different motherboard chipset, different CPU (AMD, not Intel), different video card, different NIC - pretty much everything was different! (Though I did have the all the drives in the same places on the IDE chain as before, i.e. primary master was 1st hard drive, primary slave was 2nd hard drive, secondary master was CD-ROM, secondary slave was CD-RW, which presumably kept LILO happy).
I then (just for more giggles) tried booting into the old Win98 SE install. As I expected, the install was totally hosed and never got beyond a slew of error messages followed by a freeze.
So I would say the answer to your question is a qualified yes. Yes, it worked on the two systems I tried. But I do not know if it would work between any two PC's with Linux-compatible hardware.
Despite all of Linux' imperfections, it continues to amaze me what an amazing end product has grown out of Richard Stallman's idealism, Linus Torvald's urge to scratch an intellectual itch, and the voluntary contributions of thousands of faceless developers.
-Aster Oid