“With the last year or two of Linux press describing the financial woes of various Linux distributions, it’s refreshing to see a new Linux distribution launched with some fanfare. “New” is something of a misnomer–the Xandros Desktop is a descendant of Corel Linux, but with a new purpose and sharper focus than ever before.” Read the review at LinuxPlanet.
Xandros Desktop–Not Your Father’s Linux Distribution
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Hehe I loved the title of this.
My father is clueless when it comes to linux. He taught me how to use DOS back in the day, but since then he comes to me for all his computer needs.
I am considering trying Xondros. I am over Red Hat 8.0 because Nautilus just doesn’t like me at all.. and the problems I have no one else seems to be able to reproduce, so tonight i’m knocking out RH8 and putting in Mandrake 9, if I don’t dig that I’ll try Xandros.. I really like the idea of Click N Run and Xandros Networks so it might be worth the money to not have to hassle with spending hours trying to find the right version of something that will compile right on my system or the right RPM dependancies.
To bad.
My father never will switch to someone else than Windows, he just can’t get used to changes.
Bah, the only PC we have capable of running modern distro’s and we’re running Windows on it..
> My father never will switch
> to someone else than Windows,
> he just can’t get used to changes
Someone who used DOS can’t do without windows now? I know the solution to that! Just hide windows, so he doesn’t even have an option!!
. You will be surprised @ how much your dad can learn, and how quickily to, if he had to!
..according to the reviewer, it stands for WINdows Emulation!
..Which some people won’t like.
Caught up in the post-coital depression of the Linux market
Really? What did the dot-com bomb have to do with sex/copulation? I don’t recall mergers or anything like that being the most common outcome, so I don’t think its a bad pun.
Hmm, Lindows,& Xnadros both are basing their desktops on
Debian. They feel that Debian’s apt package management is
so good they chose it over the predominant rpm.
Why not go straight to the source?
The myth of Debian being hard to install is just that, a myth.
If you want a little hand holding Libranet makes the
install and use of Debian easy.
Or try Knoppix if you want to take Debian out for a quick
spin. It runs off a CD and needn’t be installed at all.
Does it really matter what Distro you use, just as long as you get a little variety in you’re computing diet? When I first started using Linux, I thought that the distro mattered. Now, I realize that its not the distro that matters, so long as I am using linux.
it took me a week to get it fully working on my laptop (no Linux distro would work with sound on my laptop) Debian uses a very vanilla system so it is easy to apply patches and install new kernels.
in a week I got a preemption, lolatency, ACPI patch on my 2.4.19 kernel with the lattest AA VM and dynamic proccess timeing. I also got my DVD to work correctly (now If I can only get teh FPS to get better)
Debian is by far the easiers to get running and keep running.
… is eugenia geting a kick back … hummm, well you have to pay for this site somehow
If I remember right, Lindows is based on Xandros(Corel linux).
Anyway It seem there are only two(sorry I newer liked Suse) distros that my dad could use. I would say Mandrake distros are very good, but some how they screw all x.0 releases, all x.1 and x.2 are better (8.2 best so far). At the moment I am using RH8 and I kind of like those easy GUI setup tools (netwoking, printer setup, so..).
Lindows is not based on Xandros. Both Lindows and Xandros are based on Debian. How can Lindows be based on Xandros if Xandros has only now come out and before last week Xandros was a closed beta test distro?
WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Lindows is based on the early work that Xandros did and what Corel already had done, Xandros has been in development for over a year, it didnt appear last month..
As a xandros beta tester, I can say that fundamentaly it hasent chaged since last Feb. Also, on our Xandros Beta bugzilla there were e-mails such as “[email protected] , and [email protected]”
so there definatly was a connection early on
brodie
“Xandros has been in development for over a year, it didnt appear last month.”
Yes, I know that. That’s my point. Since Xandros has been in closed development for over a year, and since the testers had to sign NDA’s to become testers, I don’t see how Lindows, which released 1.0, earlier this year, and released 2.0 a month ago or so, could be based on a distro that was closed for beta testing until it was publicly released a week ago.
Now, it could be that Lindows has elements of Corel in it, which may have been publicly released before Xandros bought Corel last year, but I don’t it’s correct to say that Lindows is BASED on Xandros. They may share a common ancestry (i.e. Debian and/or Corel), but that would make them siblings, not parent-child.
when early Lindows pre-releases came out, their splash screen clearly said “Powered by Xandros”…
The company [Xandros] has also licensed its core technology to Lindows.com, a Linux desktop startup formed in October by Michael Robertson, the founder of digital music company MP3.com Inc, Bego [Xandros CEO] said. Lindows is packaging Xandros’ distribution of the operating system with a technology that enables applications developed for Microsoft’s Windows operating system to run on Linux, he said.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/0125xandros.html
monty
Ok, my bad. You guys are right. 🙂
How is Debian as a desktop linux? games, multimedia, music- if there isn’t a deb package for something you want, can you still install it? It seems like the stable deb is always about two years old- computer years are even shorter than dog years, so that’s a significant gap!
I’ve also heard it’s a real pain for printing. True or no?
thanks,
Alice
debian works verry well if you want to view/listen to media
the only “problem” is that debian itself is verry pure so you don’t get the divx codec’s and other stuff
but then again they are easy to find and add to you’re system
finding software is also pretty easy, almost every project has debian packages available and installing from source is also verry easy with the debian utils.
just make sure that you find a few unofficial repositories so that you can “apt-get” whatever you want
example :
there are packages for video-codec’s, enlightenment 17 (e17) kde 3.1 ,…..
you just need to add them to you’re /etc/apt/sources.list file
anyway I can recommend debian
although setting it up might be a bit dificult for first timer’s (note, debian was my first linux distro)
if you have windows then you can just copy the codec’s you need
also try http://www.debianplanet.org
for the unofficial repositories
The point here is that Debian should be more user friendly so none of this distros should seem so fantastic for “Joe”.
I have no idea why the guys at Debian begin another project (let’s se how desktop debian works) with more cutting edge apps but different from using SID. Can’t believe the Progeny installer is not on Woody at least as and option (hey I now I can download an PGI-woody ISO but I mean using it as something official. Somehow Debian has become a distro far away from users, not because of difficulty but delays and lack of “visual” changes between releases. Where Xandros succedes Debian fails.
Installation of packages under any Debian-based distro is a breeze. If you have RPMs instead of DEBs, you still have pretty high probability of success (using alien utility).
Overall, Debian package management tools have been far more advanced and superior to anything RPM-based. This is because of built-in package dependency tracking that apt provides. Really, people behind Debian are doing an amazing (and probably pretty boring) job tracking all these dependencies for us and making our life a lot easier.
go get yourself the BF-XFS netinstall cd. it sets up a base debian system using XFS(have freespace available on your hard drive) as far as configuring the kernel modules, most of them can be ignored….the Ethernet card might be somthing you need to include, but if you have a realtec 8139 card, the drive is already compiles in(it is a very common chip on embeded ethernet)
I had no problems installing the system, but getting sound took me awhile becasue of the 2.4 kernels lack of ACPI(I have a laptop) but you can get the patch for that and compile a new kernel(which is also very easy with make-kpkg)
it will take some time, but I did it all in a week and now I am totaly comfortable compiling new kerenls etc. (most distros have problems with new custom kernels casue of the highly patched nature of the kernels they ship with and the odd system set up of a few…*cough*mandrake/suse/redhat*cough*)
My old IBM ThinkPad 600 has been running Debian and Corel Linux OS (CLOS 1st. and 2nd. edition) for a while. When Corel decided to stop his Linux venture I had to change to Debian (potato?) to keep some of my apps. up-to-date and also to install new KDE apps (something that I found extremely difficult to do with CLOS without breaking the entire system)
I spent a lot of time configuring sound, XFree, KDE, the ThinkPad winmodem and DSL on my Debian and at the end I was not happy 100%: For my veteran PII MMX KDE was simply too much and the GUI was really slow. Of course this was not Debian’s fault!
I like Linux. I like Debian. I like apt. For my homework and my “experiments” is all I need. Two weeks ago I bought Xandros from xandros.com and installed on my laptop. Everything worked on the first boot (*everything*) and the GUI is as fast as WinXP on the same machine.
I more than happy with my USD$ 99 purchase. Dealing and troubleshooting dependences and libraries were funny for a while but not now (I have to work!
I guess it’s not avaiable for download. What kind of license do they use?
Also the Corel Linux Download link on their page is dead, anyone know of an ftp that has it?
they use the GPL for the GPL stuff, but some stuffin Proprietary (scripts and stuff they made as well as cross over) just so you know, the GPL does not mean they have to allow free downloads, it means that when they sell the GPL binary, they must provide the code of that binary to teh buyer for free, be it on the web or on a cd in the box.
a live cd or somthing similer to that would be nice however since they are talking about $99 and not $30
Okay, let’s see:
Linux is GPL, so Corel Linux should have been GPL. Therefore, what the heck was there for Xandros to buy?
Secondly of all, I thought Click-n-Run was only on Lindows.
Thirdly of all, I have to go back to work harder on apt-rpm. I haven’t gotten it to work yet. MY FAULT, I’m not blaming anyone. I just haven’t spent as much time with it as I would have liked to.
Finally, don’t forget you can use up2date for free. Yes RedHat Network services are free for the Basic services which are updating through up2date and e-mails notifications. If you have more than one machine, you have to either create other accounts, or keep switching entitlements. I know this may be off topic, but, I was surprised to learn that up2date was free. Then again, I once wanted to get an MCSE. I tried Corel and it was super easy to install. I loved the bomber man Game.
My Question: Who is policing companies that do not release code if their OS is build around the GPL? I’m not saying Xandros or Lindows is doing that, but does anybody know if they are?