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."

Comments

Re:vs. Ubuntu?

[child_of_mercy]

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)

Re:Bah

[hendridm]

Ugh they even have an IE icon on the desktop of one of their screenshots, as far as I know it's not even legal to run IE on Gnu/Linux! & why would you want to?

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.

Re:vs. Ubuntu?

[pr0c]

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...

Re:pointless

[ezHiker]

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.

Re:No. We need people that can...

[Coryoth]

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.