The biggest little notebook of this past season is the Asus Eee, which is sort of like the OLPC XO, except it's a commercial product that you can actually buy in the store (if you can find one). These things have minimal RAM and disk space, so you can forget about getting the full Vista experience even if you could install the latest Windows on them.
If you want a "modern" GUI OS with Linux, you'd opt for something like the GNOME or KDE desktop environments: they both offer many of the same kind of eye-candy features that Vista promises, but you won't have to upgrade your computer to get them.
No one who's been paying attention will be surprised that Linux can run on a system that's light on resources. But what you may be surprised at is that new versions of Linux and associated desktop environment software will run great on these bantam weight systems. Consider this story, KDE 4: like a dream on 256Mb/1Ghz/Intel! about running KDE 4 on an old Thinkpad X60.
That story inspired this story, The little computer that could ..., about getting KDE4 to run on the Asus Eee PC.
And as if that's not enough, eeeXubuntu, which is "a custom version of the Xubuntu 7.10 Live CD with fully-integrated hardware support, including native wireless drivers, functioning Ethernet support, tweaks for low-resolution desktop environments, and other miscellaneous fixes." For the Eee PC.
If my fingers weren't getting bigger, stubbier and more clumsy every year, I'd have a heck of a time deciding between the Eee and the OLPC XO, I can tell you that much. Times for portable computing are getting a lot more interesting.
Comments