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 Alan Gross, who resigned in January 1999. In April 1999, Caldera Thin Clients released the no longer needed sources to
GEM and
ViewMAX under the
GNU General Public License (GPL). In July 1999,
Caldera Thin Clients decided on a major refocus on
Linux and consequently changed its name to Lineo. Lineo licensed a stripped down
OpenLinux distribution from
Caldera Systems and named it Embedix. They continued to maintain the former Caldera Thin Clients sales office in
Taipei in 1999. In January 2000, Lineo reincorporated in
Delaware. Lineo's technologies fully owned were well ahead of competitors' products in the
embedded system portion. These technologies included: • Rt-Control provided
μClinux - a version of Linux for
microcontrollers, such as the Motorola
68k/
ColdFire line,
i960,
ARM7, and
ETRAX CRIS chips. With these
chips lacking
MMU and thus unable to provide
multi-tasking capabilities,
uClinux was able to run full-featured in as little as 150
KB of
RAM with a 1
MB ROM chip. • FirePlug - Linux-based projects, such as their Linux
firewall built on the ThinLinux product, which ran in as little as 2 MB of disk/flash storage and 8 MB RAM. • Embedix - Lineo's
flagship product that ran a complete multitasking, networked Linux operating system in 2 MB of ROM/
flash and 4 MB of RAM. • Embedix
SDK and the
Embrowser - a fully graphical
web browser for embedded systems. Embrowser was Lineo's port of the 32-bit
Extended DOS-based browser
DR-WebSpyder, originally based on the
Arachne browser. 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 offered far more advantages and allowed for a fully
hardened system, that is, Lineo utilized a custom Linux kernel. Through the six companies 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. Lineo's president and CEO, when it reformed under the new name, became
Bryan Wayne Sparks, who also had been one of the original founders of Caldera, Inc., in 1994. At the time of its creation, Lineo had 14 employees. Lineo's main product was
Embedix, a lightweight
Linux distribution for embedded systems, licensed from
Caldera Systems, Inc., another subsidiary of Caldera, Inc. Another product was
DR-DOS, an
MS-DOS–compatible
disk operating system, previously developed by
Caldera UK Ltd. between 1996 and 1999 and originally acquired from
Novell by Caldera, Inc., on 23 July 1996. Through its acquisitions Lineo also had a range of products in many different product categories. Through a series of acquisitions and mergers, Lineo eventually ballooned to a peak of about 350 employees, with offices in seven countries. The companies that it acquired or merged with were: • Zentropix – realtime Linux specialists • Rt-Control Inc. – uClinux creators, very small board (uCdimm) vendors • Moreton Bay – VPN/Router vendor (located in Brisbane, Australia) • United Systems Engineering (USE) – Japanese Linux consulting company • Fireplug – Canadian Linux consulting company (ThinLinux product) • Inup – High availability Linux • Embedded Power Corporation – Realtime and
DSP OS (RTXC product) == Decline ==