Corel Linux

Corel Linux — officially Corel LINUX OS — was the strangest bid of the boxed-set era: a desktop operating system built not by a Linux company, but by the maker of WordPerfect and CorelDRAW, one of the few software firms on Earth with both real desktop applications and a corporate reason to want Windows to lose.

It lasted less than two years. It is still one of the most instructive failures in desktop history — because the product was genuinely good, and it died anyway.^[1]

Why a word-processor company built an OS

Corel's founder Michael Cowpland spent the late 1990s as one of the few CEOs willing to say the quiet part: Microsoft Windows had a monopoly problem, and somebody ought to ship an alternative. Corel had motives no pure-play Linux vendor could match. WordPerfect — the office suite that once outsold Word — needed a platform Microsoft didn't control. CorelDRAW needed a future that wasn't hostage to a competitor's OS roadmap.

So Corel went Linux-first years before it shipped a distro. WordPerfect 8 arrived for Linux in 1998 — a full commercial office suite on a free OS, a genuine event. Corel contracted CodeWeavers to push Wine forward so its applications could run without Microsoft underneath, sending improvements upstream — one of the earliest sustained corporate investments in Wine. It even bought a hardware play, the Netwinder ARM network computer, in 1999. The LinuxOS was simply the keystone of a strategy already underway.^[2]

Corel LinuxOS

Corel launched LinuxOS at Comdex in November 1999 to an audience primed by the Red Hat IPO three months earlier. ZDNet covered it under the headline "Corel puts a penguin on the desktop" and called it "the first end-user Linux" — the phrase "Linux for the rest of us" attached itself immediately.^[3]

Underneath the polish it was honestly built: a Debian base, a customized KDE 1.x desktop, apt package management behind a friendlier Corel Update tool, the Corel File Manager standing in for KFM. It competed explicitly against Windows 98 and 2000 — and also against Mandrake and Red Hat, who were fighting for the same shelf space.

Second Edition arrived August 15, 2000 in three flavors: a free download, a regular box, and a Deluxe edition bundling WordPerfect Office for Linux — the full "alternative stack" vision in one SKU: free OS, commercial office suite, one vendor.^[4]

It reviewed well. It sold, by Corel's own numbers, almost nothing: LinuxOS revenue was about $2.7 million in fiscal 2000 — roughly 1.5% of the company — and falling.^[5]

The $135 million handshake

On October 2, 2000 — seven weeks after Second Edition shipped, weeks after Cowpland resigned as CEO — Microsoft announced a "strategic alliance" with Corel: $135 million for 24 million non-voting convertible preferred shares, joint .NET work, and a settlement of legal disputes between the two companies.^[6]

Buried in the SEC filing is the clause that tells the real story: on Microsoft's request, Corel was obligated to provide thirty full-time engineers — twenty developers and ten testers — to port the .NET platform to Linux. The company that built a Linux OS to escape Microsoft was now contractually available to port Microsoft's framework onto it.^[7]

Whether the investment directly killed the distro or merely made the decision easy is argued about to this day. Wired's reporting was blunt: Corel had decided "not to enter into a head-to-head battle with Microsoft." What is not argued is the sequence — Cowpland out in August, Microsoft in October, and the Linux division gone by the following summer.

The Xandros afterlife

In August 2001, Corel sold the majority of its Linux division — code, team, and roadmap — to Xandros, a startup assembled by Linux Global Partners largely from the same engineers, for a reported ~$2 million plus a 5% equity stake. The strangest bid of the boxed-set era ended where many such stories do: the people kept the torch after the company dropped it.^[8]

And the code kept working for years. Xandros Desktop shipped in 2002 on the Corel foundation — and in 2007, a version of Xandros came preinstalled on the ASUS Eee PC 701, the little netbook that sold out worldwide and briefly made "a mainstream Linux laptop for normal people" a shipping fact rather than a prophecy. The four-click installer's DNA made it onto more ordinary desktops than Corel itself ever did.

My install

The screenshots in this article are not press images — they are my own Corel LinuxOS 1.2 install, still running. The LILO menu, the Install Express completion dialog, the KDE desktop with its Trash, My Home, Netscape and Printer icons — and the Password Settings window — a dialog I filled in myself, on a domain I named, on a machine I installed by hand.

I was one of the people who bought the boxed-set era — I ran this exact system, clicked through this exact installer, and set this exact domain. That is the quiet truth about that era: its artifacts survive on the machines of the people who were there. The distro died; my install didn't.

What it proved

Corel Linux demonstrated, early and at real expense, three things the desktop fight kept relearning:

• Polish was possible. A real company could ship a friendly, working, four-click Linux desktop in 1999. The technical problem was never the blocker everyone assumed.
• Motive was the blocker. The product died not of bugs but of incentives — a struggling application company could not sustain an OS war against its largest investor. Every later attempt (Linspire, Ubuntu's Unity push, the netbook wave) re-discovered some version of this.
• The code outlives the company. Debian underneath, KDE on top, Wine upstreamed, the team absorbed into Xandros, and Xandros onto the Eee PC — nothing Corel built was wasted, even though Corel itself kept almost none of it.

The Year of the Linux Desktop never came. But on one machine — mine — the password dialog still holds the domain I named, and the install still boots.

Quiz

• Corel LinuxOS was built on Debian with a customized KDE desktop.
• Corel's WordPerfect and CorelDRAW work helped fund early Wine development.
• Microsoft's 2000 investment included an obligation for Corel to port .NET away from Linux.
• The Corel Linux codebase survived as Xandros, which later shipped on the Eee PC.
• Corel LinuxOS was discontinued because its installer was too difficult.

Notes

• All screenshots were taken by Rocky L. Oliver on his own Corel LinuxOS 1.2 install — first-party primary material, not press or web imagery. Sections written in the first person are the author's own account.
• Whether Microsoft's investment directly killed the distro is contested; this article reports the sequence (Cowpland's resignation, the October 2000 alliance, the August 2001 sale) and the SEC-documented .NET-port obligation, and lets the reader weigh causation.
• "Linux for the rest of us" was the era's framing (ZDNet's launch coverage); exact box copy varied by edition.
• The Netwinder, WordPerfect 8, and Wine sponsorship are covered as motive context; each deserves its own article.

References

1. ZDNet — "Comdex '99: Corel puts a penguin on the desktop," November 17, 1999.
2. Corel Corporation FY2000 10-K (SEC) — Microsoft share purchase terms; the 30-FTE .NET-to-Linux port obligation; LinuxOS revenue ~$2.7M.
3. Microsoft press release — "Corel and Microsoft Announce Strategic Alliance," October 2, 2000.
4. Wired — "Xandros Buys Corel's Linux," August 2001.
5. Corel LinuxOS Second Edition release, August 15, 2000 — download, regular, and Deluxe (WordPerfect Office bundle) editions.
6. Rocky L. Oliver's Corel LinuxOS 1.2 installation — screenshots of LILO, boot splash, Install Express, and the KDE desktop.