Into the Wild Spaces

The Good

Xandros offers an excellent product, and when non-Linux users show any interest in learning about or trying Linux, Xandros is the distribution I recommend to them. The Open Circulation Distribution offers almost complete functionality in order to test it with your hardware (always an important thing to do when dealing with Linux, whose hardware compatibility issues are its primary source of discontent), and if you know how to use Bittorrent, you can download it for free. If you download it from a browser without using Bittorrent, it costs $10. I think this is fair.

Business Model: Xandros is a business and it offers a product. That product is for purchase only, which annoys Linux users accustomed to free downloads of new software who are unwilling to pay. But Xandros is not targetting that kind of user, who has the technical wherewithal to obtain and install Linux by less user-friendly means; rather, Xandros intends to make Linux accessible to normal computer users with an average skillset who are willing to spend a few bucks in order to avoid the frustrations so common to other Linux distributions. In general, I fall into that category. As a consequence, in exchange for $100, you get a reputable company with excellent tech support, a product that has been well tested to work the first time around and work well (no more all-night configuration sessions), and other good resources like a great manual. If $100 seems too expensive to you, then Xandros is certainly not for you, and freely downloadable distros like Ubuntu might be more your cup of tea.

The Install Process: It took three clicks and happened while I was elsewhere, watching a film. At no point did it ask any questions that were confusing, technical, or difficult. This is one reason Xandros is so easy to recommend to new users.

The Desktop: With the exception of installing Mozilla rather than Firefox and Thunderbird (both of which you can add later with little hassle at all), the Xandros Desktop is lean, mean, and clean. Xandros installs KDE 3.3, a very good-looking and technically capable desktop, and configures it so that it will be accessible to refugees from Windows. It is intuitive and easy to learn, both of which make this an excellent desktop. Xandros has also taken the time to deal with Linux-annoyances that result from the Unix mindset, like users being unable to fix the clock without admin privileges. Thank you Xandros for setting the bar a bit higher on the usability battlefield. Xandros' custom-made login/logout/fast user-switching functionality is also more intuitive and simple than the stock KDE equivalent, and make Xandros pleasant to use.

Networking: Networking in Xandros is so pleasant and easy it's ridiculous and is without any doubt the most pleasurable part of the distro. It's easy to configure DSL (PPPoE), Ethernet, Dialup (PPP), and even exotic connections like parallel cable (PLIP) and serial cable (SLIP) networking! Having tried unsuccessfully to deal with PLIP on another connection this capability fascinates and impresses me.

Software and Configuration: Xandros also offers Skype software for Voice over IP (VoIP) internet telephony capability, and was the first desktop to do so (They later produced something called Surfside Linux, which concentrated on safe email, web browsing, and telephony - an interesting and novel idea). OpenOffice.org comes preinstalled and ready to use (though, as usual, it's slow to boot up). Packages are intelligently-labeled.

VPNs: Xandros is the only distribution I know of with native ability to connect rather easily to a VPN, and I happen to use one to connect remotely to my university's academic journal repository. Linux is perfectly capable of doing this if you are a networking guru and can configure it yourself, but I haven't got the foggiest idea how, and Xandros makes it so simple it's hard to believe. Xandros is the only distribution that permits you to connect to a VPN with this degree of ease and in my opinion this is a huge selling point for the distro.

Crossover Office: I don't use Microsoft Office at home and don't care to, but I did go to the trouble of playing with Xandros' Crossover Office configuration to see how it works. This is a package system that permits you to install and run Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and several other packages. It was missing some native functionality for advanced Office featuress like the equation editor, but otherwise worked flawlessly. And to my chagrin, Microsoft Word booted several times faster than OpenOffice.org even running on Crossover. For anyone who needs Microsoft products this is a big sell. I don't happen to need it, but was convinced this was useful provided you already have a Microsoft office disk hanging around to install with.

Documentation and Support: Xandros comes with a great little manual describing how to use the software and configure your machine. Their phonecall and email support were excellent. Less useful were the user forums, which I found full of newbies asking simple questions in great panic. The forums were staffed by Xandros professionals that answered questions thoughtfully and well, but overall the forums weren't all that useful to me.

The Bad

Problems with my System:

My troubles were mostly hardware-based, and the consequence of Xandros relying on Debian packages which other Debian-based distibutions have also caused trouble on my system.

Network Card: The most annoying of these was Xandros' inability to correctly configure my Linksys 10/100 Ethernet Adaptor, a combination modem/ethernet card (not wireless; I bought it back in 2001). Other distributions that have choked on that card are also Debian-based (Ubuntu, Mepis); only SUSE and Mandrake have really dealt with it well. I really wish the different distros would combine their databases and fix problems like this once and for all. Xandros would get to the hardware check during boot up and then stall while it miscommunicated with the card. If I physically removed the card from its socket, boot up would continue until I was at the desktop, when I could replace the card and go back to work (the card would function perfectly). I don't know what the issue is there but it's an issue common to all Debian-based distros.

ACPI: In 2005 when I installed, Xandros had trouble with my non-ACPI computer hardware, and would boot down to an annoying "It's now safe to shut down your computer" message, where I'd have to press and hold down the power button until it shut off. That was an embarrassingly Windows-95 problem in 2005. Later that year Xandros published a pair of service packs that dealt with a number of software upgrades and as a consequence that particular problem was fixed.

Xandros is Targetting a User Unlike Me:

That is to say, several of my comments about Xandros relate to the fact that I'm a bit of a power user in some ways, and because Xandros is not targetting that part of the market, it was unable to meet some of my needs. I don't think the points I make below should dampen most peoples' enthusiasm for this distribution.

Virtual Consoles: I love the command line for when I'm writing, when I'm composing email, and surfing some text-based websites. I find the environment less distracting and thus more appropriate to hard, focused work. To get any decent sort of screen resolution at all (my 14 inch screen operates at 120x64 quite nicely), the Linux kernel requires a frame buffer. Xandros doesn't provide one, so my virtual consoles operated with horrible, clunky fonts and were little-useable. Tech support tried to help me out with some power tweaks, but none helped mitigate the lack of a framebuffer in the kernel, so I was stuck with the graphical environment.

Sendmail etc.: Related to Mutt, which is my preferred email client (and one of the primary reasons I stick with Linux), Xandros provides Exim per Debian's defaults, but no easy way to configure it. I do a little better with qmail, but still need help. I was able to download and install ssmtp and putmail.py, both of which work well with mutt to send mail off my system, but overall I missed SUSE's clever YaST2 program which makes the configuration of sendmail and its equivalents easy.

Only KDE: It's a bit of a whine, because KDE is my primary desktop anyway, but on some occasions I like booting up blackbox/fluxbox/openbox, or more commonly Windowmaker or XFCE. Xandros offers none of these and does not intend to. I respect that decision as from their point of view it makes sense, but I miss those other environments.

Character Encoding: Xandros naturally gravitates towards ISO 8859-1 (Western Latin). We are currently living in an interesting and frustrating transition period as globalization and improving software technology leads us inexorably into a world where UTF is the more appropriate character encoding, and I'd like to see UTF become the default for future releases.

Packages I Added:

I found numerous packages I use or think I'd like to use that were missing from the Xandros Networks resource, including Koffice, Kpsion, Pine, Opera, Xv, and Jedit (4.2 only; 4.3+ don't install). Other packages from the Debian project are available once you enable the sources from within Xandros Networks and they are subsequently easy to install. As usual, I needed to supplement the standard package list with some of my favorites in order to achieve the "perfect Linux desktop." These included the following: opera, mutt, jed, aterm, gkrellm, emacs, auctex, ssmtp, vim, gimp, urlview, antiword, ssmtp, gqview, knode, and xchat.

The Verdict:

All in all, Xandros remains the first distribution I recommend to others. But the virtual console issue and others convinced me to play the field again. On the other hand, every distro seems to have a fatal flaw, and so I rotate among Kubuntu, SuSE 8.2 and 9.3, and now FreeBSD.

Change Log:

19 November 2007: more precision about Jedit and final distro rotation, added mention of puttmail.py.

18 March 2006: added comments about VPN and Crossover Office.