I chose Xandros Desktop 2.0, Open Circulation Edition as my Linux distribution to replace Windows XP because it is aimed at the non-technical user. That means that it is one of the distributions that I would recommend to a small nonprofit organization.
I like Xandros Desktop a lot. It is extremely easy to access Windows file and print shares. It supports dual monitors (I use a second monitor with my laptop), which is nice. It supports almost all the hardware on my laptop.
But it doesn't include all the software I wanted. I was after two packages in particular: KGPG and Kifi. KGPG is a graphic user interface to GPG, the Gnu Privacy Guard, which I use to interpret PGP signatures. Kifi is a graphic user interface to control wireless cards.
Xandros is a commercial distribution based on the free open source Debian. The way to install and upgrade software in Debian is with the package manager named apt. For example, if I want to install KGPG, I would enter at a command prompt: apt-get install kgpg. Because this package wasn't in the Xandros collection, I decided to add the general Debian package repositories to the source list for apt. That's where things got a little funny.
Upgrading my Xandrox installation (apt-get upgrade) from the new package list resulted in the custom Xandros implementation of KDE being overwritten by a new version of KDE (3.3). Lots of things changed and now my laptop is running the bastard child of Xandros and Debian. Kind of funny.
It's working OK for me, but I wouldn't recommend this experiment to anyone else.
Same thing happened to me with Xandros while I was trying to get Kgpg! After new version of KDE was installed, none of the Xandros apps worked (Xandros File Manager, Xandros Networks [Windows Update for Xandros], etc).
Posted by: David Mitchel | July 31, 2005 at 04:02 PM