All-in-all, Xandros Server 1.0 is the first release of what promises to be a popular and eminently usable Linux Server. xMC is a great server administration tool, and its central admin model and familiar Management Console-like interface will be a tremendous help for companies whose system administrators may be new to Linux. There will certainly be updates--for example, the remote desktop software crashed a few times for me while testing, which is certainly a package that many sysadmins will want to use rather than hiking to the machine room all the time. In general, Xandros Server provides a quite complete selection of servers and a reasonable set of desktop tools to get your work done. For some unknown reason, it was missing emacs, which I had to build with Xandros' rusty old version of gcc, but as a well-designed, well-supported, and affordable server solution, Xandros Server is well worth a look.

Bill von Hagen is the author of numerous books and articles on Linux and Mac OS X. For more information about Bill, see http://www.vonhagen.org.

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