After the disappointing, but maybe not that unexpected results of trying Linux Mint 6 on my old 700 MHz Pentium III computer I decided to try something else. A friend recently bought an old 733 MHz Compaq PC from someone on Ebay, and it had Xandros 3.0 installed on it. I have a Xandros 3.0 installation CD here, and it seemed like it might be a good idea to try that on my machine. In fact there were two good reasons. Firstly Xandros 3.0 is now 5 years old, and give or take a few years it matches the age of both our machines. The second reason is that it makes giving any needed support easier if I have the same installation here to ponder over.

 
There is no doubt that Xandros is a very polished version of Linux. The graphics are bright and friendly, and they have tried to make it as Windows-like as possible. Yet for all that the installation resembles a (modern) typical Linux installation. i.e. it is very simple and straightforward. I made myself a little late for work this morning putting the finishing touches to an installation of Xandros 3.0 on another hard drive on my 700MHz machine. After one failed restart it seemed to be working well. I have had a few more failed starts since than, and I have grave suspicions about the goodness of the old hard disk I used for the installation. I think I will have to transfer the installation to another hard disk if I am to keep, and use Xandros.

The first thing I did was to install service pack 2. To me, it did not seem obvious that during the upgrade you have to enter a 1 three times during the dictionary installation part. The 1 is to select the only displayed option which is US English spelling, dictionaries etc. (you can install UK English later). The first two times this comes up you can see the 1 has been preselected, but on the third time I did have to type 1 and then click on the enter button myself. After that little palava the service pack continued to install correctly.

It took a fair time before it was all done, and I am not sure that it was crystal clear that it had finished. It's probably best to go for a long walk or something while it does all the unpacking/installing.

Once the upgrade had finished I selected to install bittornado and Firefox from the internet applications area. There is a tick box for it, and that allows you to select a bunch of applications all at once,b ut it was not blindingly obvious how. Instead I just clicked on "Install now" under the description of bittornado. Just to show how old Xandros is I also installed Firefox (from the Xandros Networks application). The version offered is 1.5.0.1 ! That's pretty ancient !

 For the moment I am pretty happy with Xandros on that old machine. I think to take it a bit more seriously I will have to add some other repositories to the package manager. The package manager is actually called Xandros Networks. I think it is probably a very fancy graphical layer on top of something like the Synaptic package manager, or maybe just apt-get. One future problem with adding the debian repositories is that there will be a great temptation to add, or upgrade packages that are just too big and heavy for my light hardware. For instance, I think that Firefox 3 would be quite slow and sluggish compared to Firefox 1.5 as is offered by Xandros Networks, and as I have installed.