Follow the Australian Telecommunications scene NEWSLETTER- FREE TRIAL
 | |
|
Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery The new wave of Linux Lite – lean, mean and green
The Linux distillery The new wave of Linux Lite – lean, mean and green | The new wave of Linux Lite – lean, mean and green |
|
| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 26 June 2008 | |
|
Page 2 of 3 Like the gPC the Eee was cheap, but was a subnotebook and an extremely light one at that making it highly desirable. Regular readers will know the Eee flew off the shelves. It became hard to get for a period as demand outstripped supply. ASUS declared this a huge sales success and have subsequently expanded the line with further models.Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
These low-priced components meant that the machines in which they were housed could never ever claim to be a workhorse, but, heck, they were cheap. This can’t be emphasised enough; the computers weren’t going to run Crysis with all graphics options set to max, but they sure could compose a mean bit of word processing and really were smokin’ when it came to spreadsheets and were costed inoffensively enough such that a bit of impulse buying never really met with regret. One driver that kept costs down was bundling a Linux distribution as the operating system and thus preventing any Windows licensing hitting the end-user and pushing the price up. In the case of the gPC it was Ubuntu; in the case of the Eee it was an ASUS-customised version of Xandros Linux. If ASUS began the Eee’s life with their Windows XP variant it would likely not have been successful – being pushed up a price point and then having to compete with low-end “regular” notebook computers that boasted much more usable screens and hard drives. The types of people who purchased these systems were normal folk. Not everyone was a self-professed geek who was going to be comfortable recompiling the kernel to be sure required device driver modules were supported. They were, for the most part, end users who wanted to achieve tasks on their computer like read e-mail, search on Google, write letters and look at their digital photo collection. There have been no widespread reports of Linux causing disappointment. We didn’t check the news the day after these systems got snapped up to find hordes of angry users loading up Microsoft Windows, or revolting over the bundled applications being hard to use or because they felt they didn’t get good value for their money. The reality was quite in contrast: Linux worked. Computer users could achieve the things they wished to do. The underlying operating system was natural and effective. Linux saw wide scale adoption and usage almost by default, simply because people wanted the systems it so happened to be powering. CONTINUED |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
