Review: Xandros Linux 4.0 Professional (Page 2 of 4)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Jun 29, 2007 at 04:38pm
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Installation
When I first received my review copy of Xandros 4.0 in the mail, I was surprised to find a big shipping box, inside of which was a shrink wrapped package containing a new user booklet and a Xandros software box. Inside the box was an install cd, an applications cd, the ever handy EULA (end user license agreement), some Xandros stickers for your case, a quick start guide, a skype calling card and the installation license key on a sticker. After much fighting to get the small envelope open that contained the install CD’s and other items listed above, (I swear someone went glue happy when they sealed this envelope) I popped the CD into my test station and booted it up. I was greeted by a simple boot prompt that gave me the option to choose if I wanted to boot into the troubleshooting menu or install Xandros. Obviously I chose the latter. After that it continued to boot, initially searching for and detecting all of my hardware, including, surprisingly enough, my video card, and loading all the drivers for it. In some cases it even went so far as to load any proprietary drivers that were included in the distribution for my other hardware. After a few moments to get those loaded I was greeted by a welcome screen with a smiling lady and a picture of a Xandros install cd. A simple click of the “next” button, and a quick click to sign away my first child (I’m kidding, I’m kidding), I was greeted by a screen with two options. Express install and Custom install. Really, unless you have some reason to choose custom install, express seems best to go with because it’s less hassle to deal with and you get the same end result with both. If you’re unfamiliar with which setting does what and which is best for you, the quick start guide (aptly named the “Getting Started Guide”) will tell you all you need to know ranging from installing Xandros along side another OS to installing on a blank machine.
Choosing express install I clicked next. You’re initially asked for an administrator password. Minimum length is 6 characters, so no cheating here by leaving the password field blank. While this is a good start, one bad thing crops up. You can put 123456 as your password and get away with it. So strong password support isn’t there yet. Forcing a user to use a mixture of letters and numbers or something very secure for the root user should always be required. But I’ll leave that up to the developers of Xandros to decide if that should be added. I think it should, but that’s just me and my belief that security should always be first. A quick click next and I was given a summary of what Xandros would do along with a nice warning that I was about to wipe out all data on the drive. So a quick click of the finish button and off we go! From here it went through a series of steps in which it prepped the drive and eventually installed Xandros. Sadly there was no live cd option on this disk to allow me to see if it would run right on my machine, so what I’d end up with after installation was anybody’s guess. Evidently the developers assumed that if you got this far, it probably would.
One interesting thing I did notice about Xandros is that it’s very focused on moving people away from Microsoft Windows and to the Xandros version of the Linux desktop. Ironic given their recent patent agreements with the same company they appear to be trying to defeat, or at the very least undermine in some small way. After a boring 30 minutes of waiting for Xandros to install (this is probably due to the 2+ gigabytes of data and programs it has to install) and several tuna sandwiches later, it was time to get down to business and test the product.
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Average vistor rating: 3.3 out of 5 (23 total votes) | |
