When Asus first announced the Eee PC, the company explained that one of the ways it would keep the price down on its tiny laptops would be by shipping machines that run Linux instead of Windows. But Asus rose some eyebrows with its choice of Linux distributions. While Ubuntu, Fedora, and several other distros have gotten a lot of attention over the last few years for being consumer-friendly versions of Linux, Asus went with Xandros, a less popular distro.

There are a few advantages to Xandros. First, the distro is extremely conservtive, which means beta software doesn’t make it into the main repositories very often and if you install something that is in the repositories, there’s a good chance that it’s going to work. But on the down side, you’ll often have a hard time finding the newest versions of popular applications like OpenOffice.org or Firefox. There are other, more technical reasons some folks have a love/hate relationship with Xandros, but honestly I never paid much attention to the relationship between Xandros and Microsoft and all that other stuff.

Even though Asus is now giving Eee PC customers a choice between Windows and Linux, the initial decision to use Xandros has given the distribution a lot of attention. And it looks like the Xandros team wants to leverage that attention to market its software towards other netbook/ultraportable device makers.

It doesn’t sound like Xandros has signed any new partners just yet. But I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more from this company in the future.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers