Mandriva claims to have 6 million to 8 million users worldwide, with about 20,000 of them paying for support and maintenance. The company's Corporate Server software supports both 32- and 64-bit hardware and starts at $369 per server. Users of that product include French oil company Total SA, France Telecom SA, the city of Milwaukee, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, Bancilhon said.

Mandriva's other large customers include London-based HSBC Holdings PLC, which has 1,100 servers running Conectiva's version of Linux, and the public schools in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which have installed 19,000 Conectiva-based desktops and servers.

But most of Mandriva's corporate customers in North America are small or midsize companies, such as Indianapolis-based Global Transport Logistics Inc., which runs an older Enterprise Server version of Mandrake Linux on five servers.

"Most haven't been rebooted in three to four years," said Brent Meshier, the company's network operations manager.