Xandros, originally a revamped Corel Linux OS, provides a very stable, rock solid Linux distribution for the typical Linux newbie. Read the review at OSWeekly. TheJemReport also features an interview with some of the Xandros developer managers.
Xandros Home Edition Premium Review; Interview with Engineers
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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9 Comments
2006-08-15 11:30 am
I enjoyed the interviews. It’s nice to get a perspective from the folks actually making things work.
I also enjoyed the review for the most part. I thought it interesting that he couldn’t pop his email onto Xandros but whatever. I did think his conclusion was a little odd. It’s a rock solid, easy to use distribution with a great gui, but he can’t recommend it to new users. Umm, I’m not following. Is it because the software he likes isn’t in the Xandros repositories? Depending on what a new user wants, that may not be an issue. It looks to me like an excellent start distribution. Perhaps the more “power user” types would eventually move to something else but an OS that’s easy to use and easy to set up seems perfect for newbies.
Quicken, TurboTax etc – an new user might ask
Is the reviewer installing on a 486? Why is he using a Dynamic Disk Overlay?
Interesting – I was mulling over their career page. I think working with Linux would be interesting. It was no surprise that the people mentioned used to work for Corel.
A good review, pretty much sums up my own experiences.
Unlike the reviewer, I found support for playing multimedia files from within Firefox pretty poor with the default Xandros install, a few file types are just not supported out of the box (e.g. Quicktime 7 trailers for Apple.com or Windows Media files on some sites, etc.) There are hacks and workarounds available to add this functionality, but non-technical Windows refugees may not know how to find such hacks and apply them comfortably.
Many other Linux distributions play embedded media fine now (e.g. Linspire, Freespire, PCLinuxOS) and have much richer software repositories available for adding any extra functionality you need. As the reviewer pointed out, Xandros Networks offers only a very limited selection of software and mostly in older, out-of-date versions. Again, you can hack around yourself to get what you need, but many won’t feel comfortable doing this, and you could also end up affecting / breaking the Xandros-specific customizations by doing so.
“They fall flat on their face with their lazy approach to software availability and by making the registration process totally annoying…For home users (especially beginners), you are better off with Ubuntu or Linspire.”
Yup, I would agree with these conclusions.
There’s a tutorial here:
http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/42/1/
Now there’s no excuse for not knowing where to go, or how to apply the hacks.
There’s a tutorial here: