Xandros and Puppy Linux - both good distros

DudeBoyz

I just put these through their paces on the Parallels Virtual Machine on my Mac - I like 'em both.

Puppy Linux is for beginners, but it works great and it was a breeze to select monitor resolutions - even did the 1600x1000 special res I like for running it in VM's on my 1920x1200 LCD that the 24" iMac comes with. That way it fits nicely in a window and doesn't take up the full height. If I do run like 1600x1200, because of the Apple menu bar at the top of the screen plus the bar at the top and bottom of the Parallels window, it cuts off part of the screen. So, 1600x1000 is about perfect.

Xandros didn't let me config it for 1600x1000, but 1280x1024 rocks the house. PLUS one of the totally cool things about Xandros is that it IMMEDIATELY allowed me to connect to my windows workgroup on my home network. OS X does that nicely, but Xandros is the only Linux Distro that I have been able to make that work with. Accessed shared folders and printers without a hiccup. It's pretty incredible. It's a nice interface too.

Puppy Linux has a nice and fast package manager. Was able to install Gimp and MC (midnight commander) right off the web with no problem at all.

Either one of these is preferable to Ubuntu/Kubuntu, at least for me.

Suse is still my overall fave for normal Linux users, and Mandriva is great, but I would not hesitate recommending either of these two distros to folks either.

DarkFoss

I never tried Puppy Linux thanks for the heads up.

I tried Xandros when the offered a 30 day trial of their business version ..it was 2.0
I think. I almost settled on using it when I first started with Linux. It found my daughters windows comp right away too. It was fast and stable. The biggest downside is that it was easy to break the distro if you tried to add any .deb packages from outside their own repositories.
I put it in the same group with Linspire, it's great if you don't want to fuss with anything
and have no need for any software that they do not provide.

DudeBoyz

Xandros I think might end up being the best "n00b" release I have tried yet. Too bad it costs, but it is only $39.99 and that gives you a license to use it on every machine in your home network for non-commercial stuff.

I got Samba working in Suse, at least for the files, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get my printer working.

Xandros simply included the printers in the shared Samba stuff and let me select the printer. Suse seems not to do that.

I did go into YaST and configure the Samba Server, but I don't know how to get it to read Windows printers.

It did handle installing the proper packages when I configured Samba, and it activated all the daemons, so that is something. I can copy files back and forth without a problem.

Xandros made it incredibly easy so I am glad that option is out there.