This is a reminder for our ‘Xandros Business Desktop 2.0 competition’. We only had 8 entries so far, so there is a huge chance that you will be able to win this prize (valued at $129 USD). The competition ends on Wednesday night (PST time), so if you would like to get so close on winning an online competition as never before, read here on how to enter the competition.
Reminder: Less than Two Days for Our Xandros Competition
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’ve wrote an article for this site before, and the experience was nice… I’ve considered writing more, but my time hasn’t really allowed me to pursue this (too many projects, not enough time).
With that said, I’m very surprised at the short length of time you’re allowing people to submit articles for this contest.
A good article takes awhile to both research and write. I know that many readers here constantly slam the short, poorly written articles we see posted here – Not all the articles by any means, but the short one page “This is my experience installing [blah] on my machine” things wherein it’s more an install diary than a well thought out article.
I’ll bet that if you were to extend this contest, you’d get a lot better content than you will by running a “write me an article in less than a week and win a prize” contest.
In my experience, such “write it just to get it written” articles tend to not match up to well researched ones.
In other words, I’d be going for quality over quantity. Just filling the pages with fluff won’t win any new converts, nor will it appease your detractors.
Again, just my 2 bits…
Well I just sent in my own review and it wasnt so nice. I honestly wonder if they’ll post it considering the contest.
What I have found with Xandros is that it does what it does well which seems to be to allow home users to move from windows to linux. Anything above and beyond that forget about it.
What I wish personally is that someone could take the Xandros interface which is quite nice, including the Xandros File Manager, and put it in a distro that allows for more flexibility.
Oh and if you have a problem with something not working on the system forget about support. Its practically none existent and not very polite at that.
I havent tried the other windows like distros meaning Lindows or Libranet but from what Ive seen Xandros is essentially Lindows with a bit more functionality.
They claim that its a business oriented desktop but to be honest I just dont see it. In fact I mentioned that on their site and I got blacklisted for it. Boy talk about a supprotive user communitee!
But I will say a few things about it. Its easy to install. Has the best looking interface I have seen in a linux distro. And its very good a simply connecting to things such as networks and printers. this is really where it shines. I have been darn impressed with its ability to just work in this respect.
But as I said dont bother trying to installing anything to complex like Vmware on it. I tried and it failed. There was a posting on their user forum from a while back about installing it under a different version. I tried the instructions and it failed. When I asked tech support they either gave me the Xandros didnt built it so we dont support it or better why am i actually trying to do anything with the system above and beyond whats installed. How dare i!
But I think anybody who tries it will like it. For now I’m looking for another distro. Oh as a sidenote its not the fastest distro out there.
As a sidenote whats up with Mandrake and Suse orientating themselves so much to “newbies”. I thought these were both hack distros that were used by business types.
> Well I just sent in my own review and it wasnt so nice. I honestly wonder if they’ll post it considering the contest.
Are you the one who sent us the xandros review twice?
Please check your email, I replied earlier, as soon as I woke up.
The rest of your comment is off topic btw. The prize is about Xandros, but the competition is not.
I wasnt sure where to send it.
But I’ll check my email. Actually I saw the other posting about their experiences with the software so i figured id add my own.
Sorry if that was off topic.
I agree with the first poster. We just did a logo contest for our open source project and it took a couple of months to get a final decision made. I’ve been wanting to write an article for this site and still will but not in time for the competition.
A whole week to write a review of an OS that you use for months or a tutorial for something you know well, or an interview, I believe it is more than enough. “Real” journalists at news.com or cnn.com have only a few hours to both research and write stuff down.
One week. Plenty of time.
“A whole week to write a review of an OS that you use for months or a tutorial for something you know well, or an interview, I believe it is more than enough. “Real” journalists at news.com or cnn.com have only a few hours to both research and write stuff down.”
Well, I’m not so sure about that. “Real” journalists do this for a living; it’s their 9 to 5. Most folks who write these articles are likely doing so in their spare time. Someone who writes for a living will also likely be able to complete an article faster simply because that is what they are used to: writing articles. Usually, the more you do something, the faster (and better) you get at it. I was actually intrigued myself, but once I saw the time constraint…
Maybe sometime I will anyway.
That’s my point I guess. A lot of us would like to write more but don’t have a heck of a lot of time between our 9-5s and open source projects and social obligations. That said I really like the idea of a writing contest and plug OSNews all the time.
A whole week to write a review of an OS that you use for months or a tutorial for something you know well, or an interview, I believe it is more than enough. “Real” journalists at news.com or cnn.com have only a few hours to both research and write stuff down.
They write articles for a living so they know how to get the job done quickly, even though it often shows in the lack of quality of the articles.
Regular people usally don’t have a lot of time to spare, and they aren’t trained to do the job very quickly either.
Besides, I was under the impression that the contest also covered articles that wasn’t OS reviews. Some articles that includes a lot of creativity, thinking and even creating illustrations and mockups takes some time to write.
I’d say that three weeks would have been a better timeframe since it would also allow people that hasn’t checked OSNews for a few days(like me) to get the time to write something. I’m sure you’d get articles with much better quality that way.
Or maybe they could just make it a 5 year mission to boldly go where noone has gone before….
Where are we supposed to send our submission? I send it to the osnews-crew email address and I keep getting a bounce saying I’m a spammer.
What gives? 🙁
L
probably because you are using yahoo mail