“The recent release of Xandros Linux 2.0 marks an important milestone in the company’s short history. Not only is the Linux desktop market growing and changing in ways we never imagined, but the inner workings of the distro have been completely updated to more modern standards. Xandros has caught up with the rest of the Linux world and things couldn’t be better. In this market, they should turn into a major contender for the Windows conversion revolution.” Read MadPenguin’s review here, ours is here.
Xandros 2.0 – King of the Linux Desktop
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Xandros is ok, but not King of my world–sorry.
It’s the king in my books! At least this review actually touched on most of the great features! And they are great features!
IMNSHO, that was a really good review!
Sure does sound great. Some nice additions to KDE.
Annoys me a bit that they haven’t contributed some of their modifications back to KDE.. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Also the drag ogg files from Audio CD is available in Konqi.
If you are like me, you don’t read manuals for new toys… but even still, this desktop is wonderfully simple to operate.
————-
Ever since I was a kid, the first thing I did when I got a new toy is read the manual, cover to cover. I would to do this on the ride over from the store. This became a slight problem as I got older and tried to read and drive at the same time…
But with something as complex as an OS, you owe it to yourself to read the manual. Spending a few hours reading the manual will pay back enormously in gained productivity.
This is especially important for corporate types. Every minute you waste futzing with your programs is money you are losing for your employer.
Some of the features I particularly like in Xandros:
– NTFS/FAT/FAT32 resizing
– SMP support
– Intel Hyperthreading Support
– AMD Athlon 64 Support
– Ability to restore files from trash to their old location
– Great supprot out of box, Java, Flash, Realplayer ONE, Quicktime, Acobat Reader, Shockwave, etc.
– Saved a bundle on CrossOver products which in total cost $100
– THE POLISH, no other distribution has the same level of polish, Im impressed at the countless little things that Xandros has put together, such as the restore function in trash, playing a CD from CDROm0, or CDROM 1 automatically
– Out of the box 3d support for ATI and NVidia cards.
– Xandros networks
All ina ll I am pleased with Xandros, it has its flwas but it is the best in tis field for desktop Linux.
Xandros looks really nice…
Ximian is better for my taste
Ximian is better for my taste
What does that have to do with Xandros? Xandros is a Linux distribution, Ximian is a Desktop Environment. That’s like saying XP is cool and all, but personally I prefer Mozilla.
What does one have to do with the other?
I was looking over the review at OSNEWS and noticed that the CD-ROM 1 & 2 in Xandros Networks sources list is referring to your physical drives, NOT the CDs that come with Xandros – D’OH!!!!!!!! I think I’m going to wait for a review of ANY forthcoming Linux distro before I actually try it, as there are usually nuggets of information in there that will save me hours of frustration when I actually use it
(When it comes to Xandros, I just couldn’t figure out why the hell I could only read apt sources from Xandros’s second CD-ROM on drive 2.)
Glad I could be of help. It drove me crazy for a while too.
Barry
What does that have to do with Xandros?
Well since the topic is:
” Xandros 2.0 – King of the Linux Desktop ”
I think is a valid opinion.
Will the new version be out soon?
What do you mean “new Version”? 2 just came out, I got mine in the mail a week ago?
This distro does have a lot of polish. It also has a lot of things that would piss longtime Linux users off. But for getting Windows users interested in Xandros, it definitely has the right stuff. I’m mainly hoping that Gnome is going to get to the point where distro developers won’t have to hack the DE to make a Linux system work within the framework of usability, speed, and innovative features.
I’m sticking with Libra, but I took the cxoffice and cxplugin debs from the Xandros CD. They installed without problems in my Libra system, and they are quite nice. Having Quicktime support is great… also eFax messenger, which I really missed from Windows. Dare I say that Office XP’s applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) actually run faster under Wine/Linux than they do in my XP Professional system? Oh my. I’ve only seen one visual bug in my playing thus far, and that is that the first time you click the Font Selector drop-down, the scrollbars don’t appear, but they do every time after that. No big deal. I only really need them for VIEWING e-mailed files, not working on them (you can install Word/Excel Viewer under cxplugin, btw). But I could easily see myself working on Word XP under WINE, if Abiword weren’t so darn good. For one thing, you can reboot “Fake Windows” (the WINE system) in 5 seconds if major components crash, though I haven’t had to yet.
Here I am, just waiting to hear how well crossover perform…but nada. The review said the speed was a bit slow. What does that mean? I have a 733mhz computer with Mandrake and it’s plenty fast for me.
Here I am, just waiting to hear how well crossover perform…but nada. The review said the speed was a bit slow. What does that mean? I have a 733mhz computer with Mandrake and it’s plenty fast for me.
I think he was comparing with running it native on Windows.
The redraw is a bit sluggish at mine (at least for Word 97), but thats all I encountere.
“This distro does have a lot of polish. It also has a lot of things that would piss longtime Linux users off.”
Those two sentences describe Xandros very well. In some parts its the most polished distro IMO and way ahead, in other parts there are simple things which don’t work well or at all and can really piss you off. But at the end I think the upsides outweight the downsides.
It’s a shame that xandros hasn’t got a live CD. I’d like to try it. Mdk does things I wouldn’t give up, like set-up my All-in-one HP printer completely (card reader included), mounting my ipod so that I can reconcile my music collection, plugin set-up, nvidia drivers, usb adsl modem set-up and, raw DV import ready and so on….
Unfortunately, most reviews concentrate on what I take for granted.
I ordered the download edition of Xandros 2 to check it out since I had never tried the first one since I couldn’t try it before I could buy it etc. But decided to go ahead an purchase the 2nd one and give it a run. Im no hardcore linux user etc but I’ve used pretty much all of them and I’d have to say I do like Xandros 2 the best. I was very impressed with it and the modifed kde is far better in my opinon. I was never a fan of the way kde looked, I kind of thought it looked a bit cartoony if you get what I mean. And since I’m a gamer I’ve had to go back to Windows numerous times etc. And at the time Xandros was released Steam(Halife, Counterstrike, etc) seemed to be working for some people on Linux so I decided to give it a go with Xandros. I managed to get it working after a few days but the framrates were not acceptable. I’d imagine there must be some workaround because I got the same framrates in every opengl mode (640×480-1152×768 etc). I do believe whatever Nvidia did with its drivers on the linux platform is better then its Windows counterpart. Opengl looks alot better running Counter Strike on Linux then in Windows in my opinion. Once I find others getting around this framerate issue with the new Steam I’ll be installing my Xandros again. One thing I’d like to see from Gaim messaging client is voice chat support. Im so used to using voice chat for yahoo based conversations that it really is a pain to go back to typing messages. And there seems to be a lack of voice chat apps for linux which both are compatiable for linux and windows(I know there is at least one app that does work with both platforms) Anyways my experience with Xandros 2 was excellant.
Maybe if they made Gnome the default desktop, maybe then I would use it again. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very good in what it is supposed to do, but sloooooow!!! Just switched to mandrake 9.2 with Gnome as the ONLY desktop, I can tell you – I’m amazed with the responsiveness of the desktop.
I’ve said it and I’ll say it again – Lindows and Xandros are the best for Windows switchers – but as I got a bit of experience with Linux I felt I had to move on to something else. Moving to Mandrake was the BEST move I could make at my level. AndI sure don’t mind having Gnome 2.4 as the DE, it launches Apps like Windows in terms of speed. Kde 3.1.4 (in both Lindows and Xandros) has made me wait everytime. And I was running it on my 3.06 P4 machine, so imagine.
I know Xandros – I have beta tested for their 2.0 release. Not interested.
My 2 cents.
:::PROUD TO BE LIVING IN THE BIRTHLAND OF LINUX:::
“Maybe if they made Gnome the default desktop, maybe then I would use it again.”
Good luck with that. Their enhancements are pretty heavilly based on KDE and I doubt that they’ll change it. Personally I find KDE to be technically superior, but I find GNOME to be prettier. KDE has been around longer, and is more mature. It doesn’t change the world on you every other release like GNOME does. To each their own…
“”Maybe if they made Gnome the default desktop, maybe then I would use it again.”
Good luck with that. Their enhancements are pretty heavilly based on KDE and I doubt that they’ll change it. Personally I find KDE to be technically superior, but I find GNOME to be prettier. KDE has been around longer, and is more mature. It doesn’t change the world on you every other release like GNOME does. To each their own…”
What are you blabbering about? KDE releases almost always have far greater changes than GNOME does, because KDE releases slower also, almost a year while GNOME has time based not quality/feature based releases like KDE.
“What are you blabbering about?”
Egads! I can’t help but ask the same thing about you!
;P
Your hpoj driver that comes with Mandrake (and RedHat, and SuSE…) has the ability to access your HP printer’s card readers. It uses the utility mtools. mtools uses cli to access the readers as a Windows labeled drive. I call mine “P:” for printer. If you want a GUI for it get MToolsFM(it resembles Krusader). Read the help files about mtools to get the specifications for setting-up the hpoj/mtools configuration file and commands.
Thought your post said “does not” when it said “does” read your card reader….
Never mind.