Xandros Cros 2025.02 Beta 1 Released

 

Today the PC/OS development team is releasing Xandros Cros 2025.02 Beta 1.  This is the first desktop distribution for the ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex Linux container and our first distribution based on Debian 12.  This distribution makes it easy for users of Linux on ChromeOS to download a package, install it and get to work right away.  This distribution is free to use under self support and you can be rest assured that our commercial customers will get the same award winning support and service when necessary in service, deployment and installation of this new distribution.

This is a beta release so we do not recommend this to be used in a production environment.  Also this release is targeted towards Intel Chromebooks and certified Intel based ChromeOS Flex devices.  An ARM release for ARM based Chromebooks will be coming soon.

System Requirements

Xandros Cros has the following minimum system requirements.

• ChromeOS 128, ChromeOS Flex 128, ChromiumOS 128
• 4gb of RAM
• 10 gb of available drive space
• Working Linux Development Environment
• Intel based Chromebook or certified ChromeOS Flex system.

We will support non-certified ChromeOS Flex machines under a paid subscription as long as that system supports the Linux Development Environment.

What's Included

Xandros Cros includes the following utilities and apps:

• Nautilus
• Gimp
• Midnight Commander
• VLC Media Player 
• GCC suite
• Clang compiler Suite
• OpenJDK 21
• .NET SDK 9.0
• Microsoft Powershell 7.5
• Visual Studios Code
• OpenSSH

OnlyOffice will be included in the final release and we will be in touch with users and customers to determine anything else that needs to be included.

You can download Xandros Cros from here

https://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/XandrosCros/xandros-cros-2025-2.zip

https://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/XandrosCros/xandros-cros-2025-2.zip.md5

The package comes with the main distribution and an install guide

FAQ

We sat down with Roberto, the lead developer and systems consultant for PC/OpenSystems LLC and asked a few of the most frequently asked questions.

Q) What are we announcing today?

A) This is our newest product in our Xandros lineup for users of ChromeOS, ChromiumOS and ChromeOS Flex.

Q) Why is this distribution necessary?

A) Look, ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex have a huge installed base among our enterprise and education customers and its not going away.  We service Chromebooks and we have seen an uptick of customers who want to make their older machines last longer and they have deployed ChromeOS Flex.  One of the main service calls we get is to install and fine-tune the Linux development environment and we had a base image we used and we decided to make that image available to our users and customers.

Q) With recent news of ChromeOS going with the Android kernel and uncertainty around ChromeOS Flex as a viable product, do you share the concerns of some customers that Google will pull the plug on Flex?

A) No.  Google sells ChromeOS Flex into the market to enterprise customers and schools.  They cant and wont just kill Flex at the drop of a hat.  The concerns around it is the Android kernel.  Since Google doesn't include support for Android apps in Flex .  It's a business decision not a technical one.  Google wants to sell Chromebooks, Chromebases, Chromeboxes.  If they include Android app support in Flex what's the motivation for their customers to buy Chrome devices ?  There is none. They already make an Android x86_64 kernel.  Even in Flex they have included Android code in the Bluetooth and Audio stack.  Furthermore, ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex are built on ChromiumOS which is an Open Source project as is Android.  Do I think Android apps will make it into Flex?  Probably, if they ever decide to make Flex a consumer product.  Right now its an enterprise and school product that they do make available for free to the public following the same strategy as CloudReady did.  

Q) Will we stop producing Xandros as a standalone product?

A) No.  We have a lot of customers and users of Xandros Enterprise both desktop and server and we will continue to produce that product for those users.  It's a top seller and we have a new release coming up soon. 2025.06 will be a great product. Our beta testers and insiders have been using it and love the stability and functionality.  But we will continue to make that product, Xandros Cros and our upcoming WSL product are additions to that catalog and not replacements.

Q) What do you think of ChromeOS and the current iteration of Windows?

A) I think they are fine.  I have a Chromebook that is my main laptop.  I have a ChromeOS Flex machine, a Xandros machine and a Windows system.  I also have a Mac.  I think Windows 11 is the best Windows OS that has come out since Windows NT 3.51.  I do understand the privacy concerns with Windows and Chrome and I share them but I look at privacy like this; if you want everything you do on the internet to be "private" don't connect.  If data is transmitted (encrypted or not) it can be intercepted and the NSA, CIA and the other three letter agencies pay a lot of money for people to decrypt it.  I do turn off all the tracking shit as much as I can but I do have the understanding that nothing will ever truly be private in terms of the internet. 

Q) Do we have any partnerships with Google or Microsoft?

A) No, I do have personal relationships with people who work at both and they are very good relationships but nothing official.  I have two people in Google who have used and liked Xandros Cros.  Any new partnerships and the like will be communicated to customers and users should any partnerships develop.

How we update our distributions

 

Many people have asked us; How often are your distributions updated?  Well we have two different ways we update our distributions.  One set of those distributions is for home and consumer use and the other one is our enterprise Linux distribution meant for businesses, schools, researchers and developers.

We base our distributions on Ubuntu's LTS release.  So we are just like Pop_OS, Linux Mint, ZorinOS and many more of your favorite community based distributions.  We take Ubuntu and strip out many of their default apps and add our own apps and features to the distribution.  We also strip out many of Canonicals own features that they add which includes; Ubuntu Advantage, SNAP's and much of Ubuntu's branding.   

While Linux Mint, ZorinOS and Pop_OS create distribution releases based on Canonicals non-LTS releases we stick with only LTS releases.

Our consumer and home distributions, Linspire and Freespire, follow every new LTS release.  So during 12 months after Canonical releases a new LTS release we go to work building the new releases and testing the new releases.  We also work with beta testers and partners to make sure we work out as many bugs as we can.  If we have to make any code changes they are submitted back to the proper channels.  So during every LTS release you can expect two distinct releases of Linspire and two distinct releases of Freespire.  Linspire is updated and released every 12 months with interim security releases "Service Packs" released every 4 to 6 months.  Linspire 12 and Linspire 14 are based on Ubuntu 22.04 and Linspire 15 and Linspire 16 will be based on Ubuntu 22.04.  We have been looking at basing our distributions on a different base such as Oracle Linux 9 or CentOS Stream 9 for right now we are sticking with Ubuntu.  Freespire is a distribution for Linux enthusiasts who dont want or dont need support.  It is totally free to use, deploy and redistribute on as many systems as you would like whereas Linspire you are paying us to support that distribution.  A new version of Freespire is released every 6 months.  Because those releases are so close together while we do monthly ISO refreshes those refreshes are not point releases or new versions.  Freespire 9 and Freespire 10 are based on Ubuntu 22.04, Freespire 11 and Freespire 12 will be based on Ubuntu 24.04 (Maybe Fedora 38 or CentOS Stream 9 depending)

Our enterprise distributions: PC/OS, Xandros Enterprise Linux and Xandros Community Edition are much much different.  We base these releases on every other LTS release as our business customers do not upgrade as often as our home and consumer releases.  You will get 4 distinct releases from these with new releases every 12 to 14 months and security updates every 6 to 8 months.  So while Xandros Enterprise Linux and Xandros Community Edition 2022.x, 2023.x, 2024.x and 2025.x are based on Ubuntu 22.04.  Xandros Enterprise Linux and Xandros Community Edition  2026.x, 2027.x, 2028.x and 2029.x will be based on Ubuntu 26.04.

Linspire and Freespire are supported for the entire life of that LTS release.  So Linspire and Freespire being based on Ubuntu 22.04 will be supported until 2027.  Our Enterprise distributions are supported for 10 years.  No more and no less.  So our Enterprise Distributions based on Ubuntu 22.04 will be supported by us until 2032.  We do this for all of our business class distributions.  We are one of the ONLY companies left that support our distributions based on Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04. So how do we do this?  When an LTS release support ends from Canonical our distributions based on that LTS release enters maintenance mode.  There are no new distributions released based on that LTS.  We strip out all of Canonicals Ubuntu repositories and add our own which contains kernel bug fixes, recompiled kernels and updated browsers and other apps so in essence it becomes a franken-Ubuntu.  After that 10 years, it enters Archive mode which we strip out all repositories, updates stop completely and we keep images of that system for customers who still use it for whatever obscure reason.  We still have images for our Gentoo based distributions produced in 2006 and some of our Ubuntu distributions produced in 2008 and beyond and yes we still have some customers who request them.  

So this is how we release and maintain our distributions.  Our processes are unique and a lot of times people are surprised by how much work we actually do to maintain all of our distributions.

Dedicated website for Xandros Enterprise Linux

 We have deployed a new dedicated website for Xandros Enterprise Linux.  You can find that here:

https://www.xandrosenterpriselinux.com

Revamping Xandros Enterprise Linux in a Red Hat world

 With the situation with Red Hat Enterprise Linux many of our customers and partners have asked us what is our policy and commitment to our community as well as our business partners.  But before we get into that we are revamping Xandros Enterprise Linux.  From how the distribution is built, what is included and even some of our support tiers.  We are going to start permitting customers and users of Xandros Community Edition to add those deployments to their support contracts.  So by the fall we will have massive changes to the Xandros Enterprise Linux lineup.

But back to the Red Hat situation.  Many of our customers and users have had questions and we are going to answer those questions and address some of their concerns.

1.  What do you do with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

We resell RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) on servers and workstations for customers who work within the Red Hat ecosystem.  We resell RHEL 99.9% of the time as a vanilla install.  The only modifications we do make for a customer is installing drivers that they need but that is only done for 2 customers.  We do offer support for RHEL and we have about 20 customers who run RHEL.  We used to make a CentOS/Fedora based distro for some of those customers but when Red Hat started giving out free releases of RHEL we ceased production of that distribution.

2.  Our commitment to open source software and the open source software community.

We firmly believe in the open source ethos and we support the open source community wholeheartedly.  We will always contribute any of our work back to their respective projects.  We do donate money to certain projects and we embrace the community as without the open source community we would NOT have a business.  Open Source Software and the community has allowed us to work in an industry we are passionate about.  When we first launched in 2006, I said then we will always have a free product for our users that is free to distribute, free to use and free to modify.  We have lived by that for 17 years and we will continue to live by that for 17 more.  

3.  What are our products and how do we sell them

We have Freespire and Linspire which are our home user distributions.  Freespire is free of charge and can be redistributed and used on as many systems as the user see's fit.  Linspire is a paid product and contains proprietary software that we do license.  Xandros Enterprise Linux which is for businesses does have a free release that is called Xandros Community Edition (XCE) that is free to use, redistribute, modify etc. Xandros Enterprise Desktop and Xandros Enterprise Server are paid releases.  We take feedback from users and customers of the free releases and make those changes and add functionality to our paid releases.  We also offer more business related functionality in our Enterprise Linux releases.   We, like Red Hat, sell service and support to our customers.  Currently we have about 280 customers of our Enterprise Linux products.  

4.  Do we make the source code available

All of the source code to our products with the exclusion of proprietary code that we dont have the source code to is made available 100% of the time.  Even to non-paying customers.  That will never change nor will the source code be put behind a paywall and we will never ask customers not to make source code publicly available.

5.  Our thoughts on rebuilders

We support rebuilders 100%.  There are thousands of workload implementations that we cant produce products for and we fully understand the value of customers making rebuilds of Xandros Enterprise Linux and we have NO issues with customers who do.  We actually have a few of them that modify it to add their own code, deploy newer kernels and alternative desktops (currently we offer GNOME) and they also understand that they are self-supporting that custom build because we cant.   We do even assist them by helping them build code, recompile newer kernels and helping to deploy that system.

So in closing we believe in Open Source.  We believe that our customers, partners, users and the community are vital to a healthy and thriving ecosystem.  We believe rebuilders are essential to this industry and others.  People who modify code, build custom distributions, and deploy specialized code are essential to a thriving industry.  Whether its community distributions to commercial distributions as long as they are not being unethical or breaking the law we support them 100%