LinuxPlanet: Xandros Desktop–Not Your Father’s Linux Distribution

“Once you log in and get past the First Run Wizard, using
Xandros Desktop is a breeze. Xandros Desktop is based on the 2.4.19
kernel, which is quite up-to-date and provides robust support for
popular subsystems such as USB. Xandros uses the devfs filesystem
for populating and managing device entries in /dev, which can be
confusing the first time you execute the df command but provides
greater flexibility for hot-swap devices. Xandros also uses the new
“hotplug” scheme for monitoring and managing hot-swap and removable
media device. Xandros uses LILO rather than GRUB as a boot manager,
which is acceptable but surprisingly dated considering how
up-to-the-minute the rest of Xandros’ underpinning are.

“Xandros’ selection of bundled software is similarly up-to-date.
OpenOffice 1.0.1, Acrobat Reader 5.0, and GIMP 1.2.3 are also
pre-installed in a Complete Install, which also includes
pre-installed IBM Java2-13. All of this contributes to a perception
of Xandros Desktop as an impressively modern and thorough desktop
distribution.

“Xandros has spent a fair amount of time branding and
customizing the KDE 2.2.2 desktop to differentiate themselves from
the pack, which is probably why they haven’t jumped to KDE 3.0 yet.
Besides just shuffling bitmaps, backgrounds, and application title
bars, Xandros has developed a few applications that are
Xandros-specific. The Xandros Update utility is Xandros’ answer to
applications such as Red Hat’s up2date and Ximian’s RedCarpet
utilities. More impressive than Xandros Update is the Xandros File
Manager, which is slick and multi-function enough to cause severe
application envy in fans of KDE’s Konqueror or GNOME’s
Nautilus…”

Complete
Story