"Xandros was spun out of graphics and office automation software maker Corel in 2001, and the company (along with its Linspire acquisition) tried to make Debian Linux as friendly (or familiar or as frustrating or something like that) as Windows. The company's experience as a commercial operating system distributor has served it well as it creates custom app stacks for companies making small computing devices.
"This is not necessarily an easy business. According to Smith, Xandros has created over 200 variants of its Linux distro for Asus, in 24 different languages with all manner of character sets - something you have to do in the commercial electronics space. You have to do lots of languages for a commercial Linux distro too. But as Smith says, Xandros has learned from hard experience that "there is no money to be made with a general purpose desktop Linux" because of the massive matrix of possible hardware you also need to support to be a general purpose OS."
