Thanks Ray, that is a good article. The author has chosen two excellent distributions that we have considered for using with the Cajun Clicker's Linux Desktop Special Interest Group. They both have their strengths and both show that free software is ready for Everyone. He's also used reasonable hardware, though it's got more RAM than the average machine here in Baton Rouge. You have to love the screen shots.
I only have two issues with the review, both of them favorable to Xandros. Crossover Office is one of the primary strengths of Xandros and should be reviewed if you want to consider the newbie's perspective. The fact that running Windoze stuff under Linux is as easy as running it under Windoze itself is a big deal. I also don't think the author understood Xandros' firewall. I'm sure that I don't but don't think it's a big deal at all. Crossover Office is the reason that Ed, Joe and I have decided to teach the SIG with Xandros. The configuration help it gives you with Wine is exactly what most people need to forever escape M$. The problem of their not being adequate replacements for programs like ACT has been talked about here on this list. Crossover is the answer. You pick the application out of a drop down menu and Crossover sets it up to run under Wine. This works well with tricky stuff like Outlook, Excel and others. If it does not work, the SIG recommends Win4Lin, which installs the whole M$ O$ and runs it in an X window by some kind of time slicing. Dual booting which both distributions do is the final solution that assures that nothing but disk space is risked by the newbie. Because of this, we can promise people that they can have Linux and Windows on the same machine and it won't be hard for them to use their legacy software. The fear of "giving up all" their Microsoft is what drives the newbie to deal with all the pain of service packs, anti-virus, instability, bugs etc, which is the Windows experience. One of the Windows Experts at the Clicker's open house bragged to me that he had "no problems", i.e. no spyware/malware infestations, with a Microsoft box for a wopping four months. People who go through all of that kind of trouble will never look back if they can share all of their Windows toys across their home network from a single Xandros box in the corner. Having the stability and ease of repair of Linux together with easy access and sharing of Winblows is a killer combination. It's very cool of Xandros to make Crossover Office available for trial use. Lots of Windows users who try it are going to buy it and it's worth the price. Xandros Open Circulation does have some kind of firewall in place. I don't know what it is, but Guarddog was unable to get around refused connections to port 22. This annoyed me yesterday at the Clicker's open house. I brought my old laptop in case people had questions about really ancient hardware. One thing I wanted to do was ssh -X into Ed's nice Xandros computer and then export a whole Windoze 98 desktop via win4lin. That would have been cool because a 90MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM won't do that very well. The Xandros Open Circulation machine consistently refused connections, even after we got and used Guarddog. I think Ed is looking into this because networking is one of the killer linux advantages. Resolving this issue is important and it's a concern newbies have and Xandros will run buggy M$ stuff with a demonstrated need for protection. I should have nmapped it, but was too busy talking to newbies. It might be as simple as Xandros, like Debian Experimental, does not run sshd by default. Getting Guarddog was as easy enough. If it works, this is a non issue and one that Xandros will be able to fix in no time. It's really cool to see how detailed your nits have to be to pick at Linux these days. Imagine applying the ease of installation, ugly fonts and bug issues to XP. The whole issue of "support" for home users is exploded by pointing to the forum sites. When you consider that the author, myself and many others have no Microsoft applications lying around the score is really GNU-Microsoft 1:0. On Sunday 27 February 2005 12:32 am, -ray wrote: > Here's a good comparison of Xandros vs. Mepis. Final score: Mepis 4, > Xandros 2. > > http://www.linuxtimes.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=852 > > ray
