Lineo

Lineo

Lineo logo
Founded	20 July 1999

Lineo was a thin client and embedded systems company spun out of Caldera Thin Clients, on 20 July 1999.

Caldera Thin Clients, Inc., had been created as a subsidiary of Caldera, Inc., on 2 September 1998. Caldera Thin Clients' original President and CEO was Roger Gross, who resigned in January 1999.

In July 1999, Caldera Thin Clients decided on a major refocus of the embedded system portion, where Caldera Thin Clients's technologies fully owned were well ahead of competitor's products. These technologies included:

This combination of technologies allowed Caldera Thin Clients to offer a full Linux operating system with a graphical browser that could run off a floppy disk. More importantly the product was unique, and this came from the fact that Lineo's view on the Linux embedded market was different from other vendors. All the other vendors believed that Linux was heavily fragmented and that the solution was to offer Linux features for real time OSes, that is a Linux API for some other OSes. Red Hat with its EL/IX created a kernel independent framework (API) which allowed some Linux software to run on the eCos kernel. Lineo did not agree with this assessment and believed the API was offered far more advantages and allowed for a fully hardened system, that is, Lineo utilized a custom Linux kernel. Through the six companies embedded Linux company Lineo acquired, they were able to extend the same Linux technology across multiple chip architectures and add real-time capabilities. The acquisitions gave broader Linux support, from very small microcontrollers, through traditional platforms like x86, and up to high end, high availability systems.

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