A Look at Xandros Desktop 3

Xandros Corporation released a new version of its flagship product, Xandros Desktop, shortly before Christmas last year. This was in line with the company's previous two releases, coming out in roughly annual intervals and targeting mostly home and business users who are interested in migrating to Linux, but would prefer not to have to learn bash. There are two editions of Xandros Desktop 3 - a $50 Standard edition and a $90 Deluxe edition, with the main difference between the two being the inclusion of CrossOver Office in the Deluxe edition. As the previous two Xandros releases received highly positive reviews by the Linux media, we expected the same high quality, attention to detail, and intuitive, user-friendly desktop as in the company's previous releases, and we weren't disappointed.

Xandros Desktop 3 Deluxe came in a standard software box with two CDs (installation and application CDs), a 9-page Getting Started Guide, and a hefty, 350-page User Guide. The User Guide turned out to be a pleasant surprise and a valuable resource for users just starting to explore a Linux-based operating system. The guide is still based on the old Corel Linux manual, but it is much more comprehensive with screenshots, illustrations, tips, and step-by-step instructions for completing tasks. Xandros has to be applauded for making an honest effort to provide solid printed documentation; nowadays, even those few distribution makers that still ship their products in traditional software boxes rarely include good printed documentation (with SUSE LINUX possibly the only exception to the rule).

After examining the content of the box, we proceeded with installing the brand new Xandros Desktop on a test computer with the following specifications: Intel Pentium 4 1.4 GHz, ASUS P4T mainboard with Intel 850 chipset, 384 MB RDRAM, Matrox Millennium G450 graphics card, two 7200RPM hard disks (120 GB Maxtor and 80 GB Western Digital), PlexWriter CD-RW drive, Realtek 8139too (on board) network card, and Lemel TF700 17 inch LCD monitor.

Surprisingly, things didn't go well - the installation media would hang during the hardware detection stage. Upon closer examination it turned out that the installer was trying to check all 18 partitions on the first hard disk (that's what a test computer of somebody testing distributions for living looks like) and would not go any further after the 15th partition. This was due to what seemed like a bug in Xandros' boot sequence (there was no problem booting Xandros 1.0 or 2.0 on the same system). We had to physically disconnect the first hard disk before we could complete the installation of Xandros Desktop on the second hard disk, which didn't have as many partitions. We decided not to hold this against Xandros since no user in their target spectrum is likely to have more than 15 partitions on their hard disk; probably much fewer than that.

There is not much to say about the installer except that it worked as expected. Xandros has produced what surely is one of the best installers of any distribution - simple enough without it being dumbed down Linspire-style, but still powerful enough if one chooses the custom install option. Hardware detection was almost perfect, with only the screen resolution requiring a minor adjustment after the installation. The system, running on top of the kernel 2.6.9, boots into graphical environment with KDE 3.3.0, but the default applications for various tasks are not always KDE packages; as an example, the default browser and mail applications are Mozilla (with pre-configured Flash and RealPlayer plugins) and Mozilla Mail. Neither Firefox, nor Thunderbird are installed, although Firefox is available for download through Xandros Networks. There is an Updates applet in the system tray to alert the user to the fact that a security or bug fix patch has been released. All the other best-loved features of Xandros Desktop, such as the desktop switching utility or the Xandros File Manager are also present.

What are the most important new features in Xandros Desktop 3? One of them is the ability to encrypt home directories of users on the system. This option can be selected from the "User Manager" module in the KDE Control Center where the system administrator can choose one of the 12 available cryptographic algorithms and two (fast or slow) creation methods. The only downside of this feature is that, depending on the selected options, it can take up to several hours to complete the encryption process. Once a home directory of a user has been encrypted, no other user, not even the superuser, can see what is inside that directory; it will simply appear to them as an empty directory. (Of course, the superuser could always install a modified kernel to capture plain text or the encryption key). Needless to say, it is not possible to delete an encrypted directory.

Xandros Desktop 3 also comes with a new firewall wizard which, designed in the usual Xandros-style user-friendly manner, allows even non-technical users to setup and run an effective firewall on their computers connected to the Internet. As an example, the user can simply tick the "Peer to Peer file-sharing server" checkbox in the wizard to enable BitTorrent traffic, which is so much more intuitive than the usual "punch a hole through ports 6881-6999", often found in FAQs or online documentation. The firewall can be turned on and off from the main menu, with an option to start it at boot time. The firewall is definitely a useful addition; we were surprised to see quite a few services running by default on a stock Xandros system (including Samba and ProFTPd), but turning unneeded services off was not nearly as intuitive as setting up the Xandros Firewall.

The Xandros-specific application that allows drag-and-drop CD burning from within its file manager has been further enhanced by the addition of a DVD burning tool. No matter how excellent K3b is for this purpose, it is always a pleasure to open a file manager, then simply drag files from a hard disk folder and drop them into the CD or DVD drive. This action then launches a pop-up wizard that guides the user through creating a new data or media project. And while on the subject of dragging and dropping files around the Xandros File Manager, this feature is available not just for mounted devices, such as USB drives or NTFS partitions (read only), but also remote file systems, like NFS, Samba or FTP - all automatically set up and ready to use.

Packages in Xandros are managed through Xandros Networks. This is essentially a web browser with a hierarchical folder structure listing applications in the left pane. Besides providing security and bug-fix updates for the product, Xandros Networks also lists a number of packages that are not on the installation CD, but are available for download. As an example, there is a whole lot of development tools and server software that can be downloaded and installed with a single mouse click, but these are not deemed essential for most users so they are not installed by default. Some might be surprised to see that GIMP or Evolution are not installed either, but this might be due to the fact that the Deluxe edition comes with CrossOver Office, which supports Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. Xandros Networks also includes an online store, which contains a curious mix of free and commercial applications. Some of these are available for free after registration (e.g. GnuCash), others require that a user become a Premium member of Xandros Networks at a cost of $39 per year (e.g. several game demos), and still others require cash payments (e.g. StarOffice, CrossOver Office, Xandros Desktop User Guide in PDF format).

Other new features include newly added VPN client (konnectvpn), a VoIP application for Internet Telephony (KPhone), a scanner application (Kooka), better support for wireless networking, ISDN connections, web cams, software modems, and Palm Pilot. However, support for proprietary media formats is still missing and so is playback of encrypted DVDs. Interestingly, although Xandros is based on Debian, which has yet to follow most other distributions and migrate from XFree86 to X.Org as its preferred X window system, Xandros Desktop 3 comes with X.Org (version 6.7.0).

There is not much wrong with Xandros Desktop 3. The developers have created a fine product that can be safely recommended to users wishing to try out an alternative operating system without having to go through a steep learning curve. And although we didn't care much for CrossOver Office, those users who cannot be without Photoshop, or have complex macros and VBA code in their MS Office files, will find the application invaluable. For the rest of us, the $50 Standard edition is a fair price for a product that has matured to become one of the best, if not the best, Linux distribution for novice and non-technical computer users.

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