Just when several Linux distributions seemed to be gaining a foothold, the search giant's brand and reputation may soon curtail their success

Much of the discussion around Google's new PC operating system has focused on a looming battle with Windows, but the biggest losers could be other Linux OSes that have been enjoying some moderate success on netbooks, industry analysts said.

Google announced late Tuesday that it is developing the Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system based on Linux and geared for people who do much of their computing on the Web. The software will eventually run on PCs, but before that it will appear first in netbooks in the second half of 2010, Google says.

More: http://infoworld.com/d/open-source/google-os-could-put-squeeze-other-flavors-linux-688