[ltp] Xandros

[SOTL]

Hi All

There is an article on News Forge
www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/23/2039209
about Xandos on a Thinkpad.

Recalling my experience is upgrading Mandrake 9.1 to 10.1 and my attempts to 
install 9.2 on my Thinkpad I find his experiences to exactly mirror my 
experiences with Mandrake and SuSE and equivalent to what has discussed here 
about Mandrake and SuSE in the last couple of months.

What I read sounds good but based on past experience and burn jobs I do have a 
few questions.

1. What is the difference between Xandos, SuSE, and Mandrake as far a package 
content? Does Xandros have the same basic packages?

2. What is the difference between package installation? At one time one could 
take Mandrake and Red Hat package from one and install them in the other they 
were so closely related but SuSE was different such that that was not 
possible.

3. Does Xandos compile like Mandrake and SuSE. I don't know about package 
compiling in SuSE having never tried it but I do know from experience that 
Mandrake and Red Had [now Fedora] are similar and little different from 
Debian, Slackware and Gentoo. The base question here is has Xandos pulled a 
fast one us and it require something special which is proprietary and cost 
big bucks to install packages or not?

4. Is this guy tell it like it is or is this marketing BS. I seem to recall 
that Mandrake 9.1 DVD will install [and probable 9.2 DVD which I have not 
tried] on a Thinkpad but that Mandrake 9.x nor 10.x CD will install while 
10.x can be installed by a geek but is completely outside the realm of 
installation by non Linux geeks with package upgrading for the 10.x series 
being equally impassible. I also recall that SuSE will not identify a 
Thinkpad monitor nor my WiFi network and that when I attempted to configure 
DSL without having the Thinkpad connected to DSL I was ask for a username and 
password. Personally I did not know DSL used user names or passwords having 
never been ask that question in the past so I do not think this is right but 
I an not enough of a geek to know what is wrong. I did install the Mandrake 
10.1 but found I did not like it enough to update the system back to 10.1 
after my HD failure wiped my first installation. 

So I guess what I am asking is that since I do not have the money to buy a new 
HD so that I have a system to play with for upgrades and modifications while 
maintaining an operating system [last 80 GB HD I bought for this Think pad 
$400.00 US] and purchase of Xandos [$80.00 US] since I do not have high speed 
capabilities what experiences other members of the list have had with Xandos 
3.0?

While we are discussing software does any have any vague projections of when 
Open Office 2.X will be included with Mandrake, SuSE or Xandros?

Thanks

Frank