Lycoris (formerly Redmond Linux Corporation) was an American independent software distributor headquartered in Maple Valley, Washington. [1] [2]
The company was founded in 2000 as Redmond Linux by Joseph Cheek, an entrepreneur who had previously worked for Linuxcare, [3] with the intent to make free software easy enough for anyone to use. [4] In late 2001, it merged with embedded systems company DeepLinux to become Redmond Linux Corporation. [4] The company's first product was Redmond Linux Personal, a modified version of Linux.
The company was renamed to Lycoris in January 2002 and its assets were acquired by Mandriva on June 15, 2005. [5]
As Lycoris, the company's flagship product was Lycoris Desktop/LX, a Linux distribution. The distribution's installer was originally based on Caldera International's OpenLinux Workstation 3.1 distribution with the rest of the distribution built from the kernel up. [4] The desktop and applications shared a high similarity to Microsoft's Windows XP, including the background image [6] that was shipped with the software. [7]