$200 Linux Laptop

[Christopher Browne]

On 7/26/07, John Van Ostrand <john-Da48MpWaEp0CzWx7n4ubxQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 23:26 -0400, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> > From Slashdot this evening, in the 'If it sounds too good to be true...'
> > dept:
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Update 2035 GMT by SM: As many readers have pointed out, the more you dig
> > into the details of this company the more fishy it starts to seem. I would
> > suggest any potential buyers be wary on this one.
>
> Asus is well known for providing durable motherboards and has expanded
> into many areas. We've used their products as far back as the mid '90s.
> They started producing notebook computers a few years ago.

Remember, there were two vendors mentioned...  The Asus product does
seem real; there was also the "Medison Celebrity."

The latter is the one which I was suspicious of, and it is the
"Medison Celebrity" that the slashdot thread considered "fishy."

In contrast, Asus is certainly a credible company to be doing this, as
they have all the relevant relationships with vendors providing the
hardware they'd need.  Indeed, it's quite likely that Asus is the
maker of some of the other brand name laptops that people may have.

I seem to recall hearing indication that Asus were manufacturing some
of the Apple/Mac laptops, and that's actually a pretty relevant "thin
edge of the wedge" as it would get them into the situation of building
Intel-based machines that don't have the "Microsoft tax."  For them to
extend that "non-taxed" region to include some Linux-based systems
probably has synergies :-).

The OTHER hardware thing I'm watching for is for the "iPod shuffle"
clones to arrive here.  They're evidently in the pipeline, and there
seems to be one that actually has a display, thereby being arguably
*better than* the Apple product :-).
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