While reviews of Xandros are a dime a dozen nowadays, I thought this one was worth a mention for sure. OSNews gives us their thoughts on Xandros 3.0.1 OCE. Much like the paid version, their OCE has a lot going for it. While the limitations are annoying, we have to remember that these are people working at getting Linux into the mainstream. I would say that warrants financial support at every turn.

To begin this review, I visited Xandros download page, snagged the public torrent, downloaded the ISO, and burned myself a copy of Xandros 3.0.1 OCE. Credit goes to Xandros for having a professional website that’s easy to negotiate and for offering instructions to help new users of all platforms perform this task.

My test machine is an 800MHz AMD box with 256MB of RAM, a 20GB hard drive, RAGE IIC graphics, 17″ monitor, and C-Media sound. It is a used system that came to me with a trashed MS install and was a good candidate for recycling. I refreshed it with some new components and it has run Debian Sarge and KDE 3.3 spiritedly. I expect similar performance from Xandros as it too is based on Sarge yet runs a custom 2.6.9 Linux kernel.

I won’t go into specifics of the install suffice to say that it’s a purely graphical affair and a walk in the park. I allowed Xandros to assume the entire hard drive and after a few clicks, the install took approximately 30 min and was pleasingly uneventful. Xandros has so polished this process that MS could take notes.