RebelSaid Cool

Taiwan's Quanta, the world's largest maker of notebook computers, will manufacture an ultra-low-cost laptop developed by Nicholas Negroponte, the chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. Negroponte, who is also chairman of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit group, has said he expects the laptops to be available to governments next year at a price of $100 each. Price seems kind of low but guess they know what there talking about. They say the laptop can be powered either with an AC adapter or via a wind-up crank, which is stored in the housing of the laptop where the hinge is located and the laptops will have a 10-to-1 crank rate, so that a child will crank the handle for one minute to get ten minutes of power and use. It has been said the first generation machine will be based on a 500-MHz processor from Advanced Micro Devices, which is one of the project's main backers, and will have 256MB of main memory, 1GB of flash memory in place of a hard drive, and a wireless LAN connection. The first of these notebooks are expected to hit the market during the fourth quarter of 2006 according to the organization. Without question... Linux will be the OS for this low price system, light editions of Edubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu would be cool distributions. The freedom of those distributions make them fundamentally different from traditional proprietary software: not only are the tools people need available free of charge, they have the right to modify their software until it works the way you want it to. I bet this type of system in the market place could even drive down the price of all laptops around the world. For those looking to put linux on laptop they all ready own: look to linux-laptop.net/ or look to linuxcertified.com/ if you want to buy a high powered Linux note book.