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Xandros Recruiting Beta Testers
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like the folks at Xandros are getting ready for a new release of their Linux desktop. They're recruiting beta testers so those of you who like to try something new, you can sign up from here. No details about when or what to expect in the new release. Xandros always lets the other distros get the bugs out of the latest bleeding edge software before they do a new release so this should be another solid release with updated KDE, kernel, X, drivers, etc. Can't wait. Gotta get me on that beta list."
how much personal information do i have to give? this is absurd.
Xandros has been around a while, and they really iron bugs out and make life simple for the user.
they have a completely free (as in beer) open release which doesn't include things like codeweavers wine gear.
I use vanilla debian on my servers but for the desktop xandros is what gets the job done, for the work I need to do anyway.
(just my 2c)
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
IIRC, they have CrossOver Office installed. You can go into the wizard thing and have it install Internet Explorer for you. Before it does, it will ask you to provide a legal copy of Windows to get the files from. It's a pretty slick setup. Might be nice in an office setting, which is what it's marketed towards anyway.
Well I'd say
1.) Xandros has crossover office, very important for many businesses (whether you like it or not), it also has StarOffice (deluxe version)
2.) Xandros has more than just community support
3.) Xandros has more liability than Ubuntu for how the product behaves
4.) Xandros, when purchased, comes with a VERY nice manual.
5.) Xandros has a very nice installer, much easier to use than Anaconda, debian, suse, etc IMO.
Having said all that, I dislike Xandros, I dont' like KDE among other reasons...
Hah! Slowing down already! I guess they must be running Xandros linux on their servers!
... what do you mean that's not how it works here?
Hahahahaha-- huh?
Xandros Business Edition offers a greater level of integration in Windows environments (particularly Active Directory environments) than any other distribution that I know of. It has Windows AD domain logon out of the box. It has a file manager which makes sharing files, changing domain permissions, and sharing files as easy as in Windows (if not easier). It also ships with Crossover Office. There a lot of other KDE customizations and enhancements that make migrating from Windows much easier.
These things might not be important to you, but for businesses looking to migrate form Windows to Linux, Xandros offers the best option out there right now that I'm aware of.
I wish the features in Xandros were available in the free distributions, but it doesn't seem that Windows interoperabilty is as great a priority with the other distros.
Note that Ubuntu is a commercially supported distribution.
Except doing an 'xhost +' is potentially horribly insecure on a networked machine.
....when it was called Windows 2000.
Seriously, go look at the screenshots. All the Windows 2000 interface components just blatently ripped off. Stuff named just a little differently, but in the same place. (e.g. "Control Center" vs. Control Panel).
Cmon guys, if people were totally ripping off some program or worse yet an entire OS that you wrote, you'd have to be angry about it. M$ or no M$, this copying/stealing/whatever stuff is getting downright ridiculous.
Oh, and let me get this straight - I'm going to try to use this thing and throw another layer of complexity into my environemnt just to try to run my Windows programs, and as an added bonus I have to pay for it? Thanks but no thanks.
We need a way to track down what we install, modify or remove. In other words, something like apt but more global. This again I'm refering to the last point I made. Maybe if we had a universal format, maybe then we'd see various package managers available to almost all distributions to make the user's life easier.
Apt is fantastic for managing a core set of distribution provided packages. Throw a nice frontend like Synaptic on it and it's user friendly too. Apt works fine for both deb and rpm packages, so you really have the majority of distribution provided packages covered. Those that aren't covered are source distributions like Gentoo, or other fairly hands on distributions like Slackware.
The problem comes when users want to install something outside of their ditribution provided set. Sure, Debian has a very large repository, but it'll never have commercial software. Meanwhile Fedora has a very small repository (comparatively). For non-distribution provided packages I'd suggest you check out Autopackage. You download a packages, run it, and it will check dependencies, resolve them if at all possible, and install itself - it's like installshield but nicer and with dependency resolution. Autopackage isn't done yet, but it already has working packages - its just lacking nice to have features like integration with rpm and deb package databases etc.
Given a combination of Synaptic and Autopackage for base and third party software I think Linux has a very bright future for installing and managing software.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Just keep in mind Xandros (or whoever) isn't Linux and couldn't possibly be. I don't think your cathedral comment holds weight if you think about the thousands of hackers/developers working across the globe that enabled Xandros to do their beta. It boggles my mind when I think of how much work goes into any distro and I'm not even talking about the work done creating the actuall distro! Beta indeed! :)
Beta is when you CVS into the developers site, download; configure; make; make install and then take the time to politely post feedback about any tweaking you might have had to do to get the stuff to work on your system. And it can be a lot of fun (and sometimes you might have an idea that the developers decides might actually be a good idea and it get implemented).
And for what it's worth I did read the book, years ago. Most of these guys aren't as anti business as you might think they are. The idea being, even after the vendors have lost interest (if they ever do) we still have all the code. The Bazaar doesn't need the cathedral.
Quack, quack.
About a 8 months ago I had a hard drive fail and decided to install Xandros to replace the RedHat 9 that was on my dead drive. I had been happily using apt-for-rpm thanks to the great guy[s?] at freshrpms.net and had long since grown to love the Debian software management way:
1. $ sudo -s
2. # apt-get update
3. # apt-get upgrade/install xxxx
4. there is no 4, its done everything is up to date, nothing else to do.
The web server that I inherited was running Debian, so I had general idea of where to look for configs and things and thought I'd try Xandros for myself as well as try it out in preparation for setting up for my mother. The mother test is yet to come yet as I've spent most of our brief visits socializing instead of messing with the computer. This will happen soon though since I must say that using Xandros has been far and away the most pleasurable Linux experience that I have ever had.
The good:
- As little battling with hardware as I've ever experienced.
- Auto recognizes CDs, my camera, other USB stuff. Finally plug and play without having to write shell scripts to mount/unmount the CD!
- Unlike the rest of the Distros, Xandros cleaned out the 'start' menu, organized them, and got rid of the dozens of choices for every kind of app. This is probably on of the most confusing things about most distros, you pull up the 'Applications' menu and see 2 office suites (KOffice and OpenOffice), 5 email clients, 10 text editors, and 4 sound players. I'm all for choice, but its overwhelming for first-timers and cluttered for everyone else.
- Everything I love about Debian, in a friendly package.
- A 'fast user-switching' button like OSX and winXP so that you can easily switch between X-Sessions without having to know the ALT+F6/ALT+F7 keys
The not so good:
- Its not the most blazing distro, but does [barely] function with KDE on a Pentium200. I am running Xandros without KDE on my laptop/picture-frame.
- It takes up about gig, but I guess this is pretty standard for distros (with apps included).
The 'not good, but problematic elsewhere' dept:
- have to manually configure things to get all 5 buttons working on my mouse. This IS doable though, and I have made up a step-by-step install guide for beginners wanting to set up Xandros. It includes all the little steps I did to get the mouse, DVDCSS, nVidia drivers, etc going. I wrote this up for a friend, but it might help others beginners too, since these things seem to beyond the scope of most distributed install guides.
All in all, I've found it to be VERY user-friendly compared to everything except OS X. At the same time, its Debian, so when I wanted to set up PostgreSQL, PHP, Perl, and Apache so I could do some work, it didn't get in my way.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers