Chinese Company Produces $150 Linux PC

srinravi writes to mention an Ars Technica article about another ambitious 'inexpensive computer' project. A Chinese manufacturer, YellowSheepRiver, is aiming to make available a $150 Linux PC built with inexpensive hardware components. From the article: "Urging potential customers to 'Say no to Wintel,' YellowSheepRiver is devoted to using its own Linux distribution and hardware designed and manufactured by Chinese companies. YellowSheepRiver hopes to close the "digital divide" by making computer technology available to the Chinese public at an affordable price. The Municator, which comes with 256MB of RAM, uses a unique 64-bit CPU with an instruction set based on a subset of the MIPS architecture. Designed by a Chinese company called BLX, the the cheap chip is clocked at 400 or 600MHZ and supposedly provides performance comparable to that of an Intel P3."

Comments

Danger for GNU/linux

[Enquest]

There is a danger that GNU/Linux will get a bad name because it mostly installed on very cheap systems. Often these projects tend to fail and then the scape goat will be GNU/Linux. Better would be that large hardware firms put GNU/Linux on there system. Just imagine Ubuntu on all Dell, HP ... systems. That would be the break for GNU/Linux

Re:Why put a drive in there?

[MoxFulder]

What if you want to store lots of MP3s, run a small web server, do software development, play movies, etc.? I was happily running on a fairly similar laptop (okay, 1 ghz CPU) until a few weeks ago. It ran linux quite well... if you can afford the latest-and-greatest to run your high-powered apps, that's great, but if not an older system works pretty well even for a lot of resource-intensive tasks.

Re:Not that cheap: don't even have to factor curre

[LWATCDR]

Yes but with this computer all the money is staying in China! China sees no reason to give billions of dollars of it's money to the US for Windows or for Intel/AMD cpus.
They see no need to be tied to the X86 ISA.
It makes a lot of sense in that it helps China become more independent of the West and possible make the west more dependant on China.
You want to sell systems to the Chinese government? Someday it may have to have a Chinese CPU in it.