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Asus to release extremely sweet Linux laptop

Asus introduced extremely nice, small (and cheap!) Linux laptop - Asus Eee PC. Priced 199$ and 299$ for larger model, this can potentially be the hottest consumer Linux machine available. And did I say already it’s small? Smaller model boosts 7″ tft with 800×480 resolution and no hard drive or optical drives. The machine has USB to connect additional optical media or hard drives. The machine also has MMC/SD/MS card reader for additional storage. CPU is 900mhz Intel Pentium M (Dothan), and Eee has 512mb ram. The bigger model comes with 10″ tft screen - but the specifications for 10″ model hasn’t been released yet. If it has 1024x or 1280x wide resolution, count me in for buying one. 800×480 is just too small for pretty much anything.

The Linux inside is custom distribution made by Xandros. It has custom ‘tab-view’ user interface which can be changed back to “full” mode which reveals a standard KDE desktop. Ships with Firefox, OpenOffice and other usual suspects. See Hothardware’s page 2 for UI shots.

More information about the Eee laptop:

• Wikipedia page (specs, etc)
• Hothardware hand’s on (Hand’s on review, photos, user interface photos)
• Engadget (short review)