The abbreviation LX stands for Xara Xtreme on Linux and was retained in some places such as the executable "xaralx".

The first version was released for Linux in October 2005, and Xara Group Ltd announced it will release the source code of the trimmed down version under a free software licence, the GPL, and seek community help in porting it over to Linux and Mac OS X using the wxWidgets toolkit.

According to the Xara Xtreme for Linux homepage, the released source code contained "the majority of the Xara Xtreme source code" excluding the CDraw rendering engine only available in the form of static GCC libraries for a few selected CPU architectures.

The progress of the Linux version has stalled and the program's website has not been updated since August 2006.

Xara Group Ltd's CEO, Charles Moir, confirmed on 15 Feb 2007 on the Xara developer mailing list why CDraw source code wouldn't be released: "For a number of reasons, one significant reason being commercial risk outlined earlier" [on this list][3] A new project, xarino, was created in December 2008,[4] which provides access to the project's source code.