Xandros: Something Scary

I was on a blogging vacation for about one and a half months due to work. A Tech Support Representative like me needs to spend most of the time with different flavors of Windows so I'll become familiar with those errors our clients usually encounters. And spend about half a day trying to recreate those errors and finding out what triggers them...

Hay!!!!

Spending weeks trying to figure out why Internet Explorer won't open Secured Sites.
Spending weeks trying to figure out why Internet Explorer can't surf while Firefox can.
Spending weeks trying to figure out why after uninstalling a program, Windows would do reboot loops.
Spending weeks trying to figure out why Windows would corrupt it's own files.
Spending weeks trying to figure out how to get rid of viruses and spywares.
Spending weeks trying to figure out why Norton & McAfee would prevent a user from surfing even with correct settings.
Spending weeks trying to figure out what process has to be ended and what startup items has to be unchecked.
Spending weeks resetting Winsocks and restacking TCP/IP.
Spending weeks...... well, you get the idea!

GOOD THING THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN TO LINUX!

A breath of fresh air... at last!

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Now let's move on
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I'll show you something scary....

I'll show you my Fedora Core 4's grub.conf...

Notice anything weird?
Look at my Fedora Core 4 entry!
This is what I'm used at seeing whenever I'm dealing with Linux...



Now take a look at my Xandros 3.1 Open Circulation Edition entry
and compare it with my Windows XP entry......


Very, very similar....
Even though Xandros is another Linux distribution...

I'm used at editing Grub and pointing it to a kernel, but Xandros scared the shit out of me!
I know Xandros invested a fortune to make it easy for us to migrate to Linux but never in my wildest dream did I imagine this happening.

At the bright side of things though, with this kind of setup, you don't need a boot loader even though Xandros comes with LiLo. All a user has to do is to make that partition bootable and direct the BIOS to boot from that hard disk. Here's a screenshot of that Boot Manager that I got from Xandros themselves. I can't provide a screenshot since I don't have a camera but I saved this image on my blog to offload bandwidth requests from that particular server.

http://www.xandros.it/images/screenshots/BootManager.jpg


One more thing worth mentioning is that Xandros mounts all detected partitions, except, obviously the Swap partition, making it very convenient for everyone switching to Xandros. It also comes with propriety softwares allowing you to play your audio and videos, even those wmv & wma formats. The inclusion of CrossOver Office with the deluxe version for those who can't live without MS Office makes this distribution a must-have for professionals, students, and your grandmother.

I have nothing against Xandros since everything has been thought of perfectly, but I find those propriety softwares and automation a bit scary. They invested a lot of money, time, and effort to make it work like Windows and this distribution would be a perfect Operating System for regular users thinking of migrating to Linux.

But I'm a bit of a control freak...
I want to manually mount my partitions...
I want to know exactly what process is running in the background...
and if necessary, kill it...
I want to know what ports are open...
that way I can close it when I don't need it...

And I want my Linux to NOT look, work, & act like Windows!