The Wintel alliance may seem as strong as ever - many believe MS purposely delayed a meaningful 64-bit Windows release till Intel was ready with its 64-bit X86 processor line.

However, away from the premium US and EU markets, it seems that Intel has its exotic mistress, in this case, one seductively dressed in - the Red Flag.
The pretext for this potentially passionate affair was "enhancing the education in developing markets," which of course still have to make some money for the Intel platform.

So, the "Intel and Linux Go to School" initiative was born, to deliver "innovative educational ecosystem programs for enhanced learning experiences" - innovative compared to Windows.

Besides a cheap box (the so-called cost-effective solution), a critical part was creating a stack customized for education that puts a full suite of desktop productivity, Internet, security and multimedia tools in the hands of the users, without requiring any payable software licenses for it.

The operating system in this case is the Chinese-based Red Flag Linux and accompanying software stack.