Over the course of the next few days, I’d have a number of problems with my wireless connection – after an extended period of inactivity, the wireless would stop working. As you can see in the screenshots, this was disagnosed by Eugenia as a bug in the Xandros hotplug scripts. I had to play around a little while, and eventually got the card to work. A “modprobe orinoco_cs” showed the module installed, but not functional. Now, my card is a PCMCIA Dell Truemobile card, and it should work under Linux. I had unplugged my ethernet cable to check if it would detect my wireless card, as one of the touted features of Xandros is “Extended Wireless Support.” Unfortunately, no go – there was no connectivity, and no light on the card. My first act was to check for network connectivity. Since I installed Xandros the day it was released, there were no updates.
You’ll want to update immediately after install.
At the heart of Xandros lies Xandros Networks, the update and software installation tool for Xandros OS. It’s worth the wait in my opinion, as after login you’re presented with a gorgeous modified KDE desktop. Xandros boots noticeably slower than I expected, slower than I remember version 2 booting and certainly much slower than my Windows XP installation. I wish the installer would check if the partition is bootable before adding an entry to the boot menu. My one complaint here is that, as per usual, it recognizes my XP installation as “Windows XP,” and then adds an option to boot to my non-bootable NTFS data store as well.
Xandros will write the boot loader to the partition you install it on automatically, you can choose to add it to the master boot record as well, as it will detect your Windows partitions in a dual boot scenario. The recommended default installation is just a few megabytes less than their “everything” selection, which includes Apache and Netware connectivity. Package selection is, as I’ve noticed with many “desktop friendly” distributions, fairly pointless.
When I chose to manually select a partition for installation, Xandros correctly guessed I wanted to use my ReiserFS Userlinux partition, and the existing SWAP space. I won’t go into too much detail, but the install is graphical and easy enough to figure out, even for someone who hasn’t installed Linux before.
The Xandros adventure starts with a fairly straightforward installation routine. With integrated CD and now DVD burning, XFM is one of the sleekest file managers out there. Xandros is based on Corel Linux, which includes the closed source, heavily modified Xandros File Manager (XFM), which is the bread and butter of this distribution. The Deluxe Edition, which was used for this review, contains Codeweavers’ CrossOver Office 4.1, which is an enhanced version of WINE, which can run Windows applications. Eventually, there will be an “Open Circulation Edition,” but for now, there are two editions of Xandros, the Standard Edition, at $49.95, and the Deluxe Edition at $89.95. Unlike many of the popular Linux distributions, Xandros is not offered in a free form for some time following the release. The release of Xandros Desktop 3.0 last week was no exception, with OS fanatics everywhere curious just what was in store. There’s always a lot of excitement when a major Linux distribution has a new release – there’s the clamour for the release notes and changelog, as well as the insatiable urge for screenshots and the search for the torrent for the ISOs.