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Mandriva Joins the Netbook Market With the GDium

Posted by timothy on from the price-is-all dept.

AdamWill writes "Lately it's hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks — the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC. Mandriva is providing the innovative operating system for the upcoming GDium netbook system, produced by Emtec. The first GDium will be a netbook with a 10", 1024x600 resolution display and a battery life of four hours, weighing in at 1.1kg. The innovative G-Key system stores the Mandriva operating system and all the user data on a USB key — nothing is permanently stored inside the GDium. You can use your own desktop and data by plugging the G-Key into any GDium."

4 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. netbooks by zogger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is headed the opposite direction, they are getting more expensive, not less, and gaining in size. When that first eeePC hit I thought "cool, pretty soon now the hundred buck blisterpack small notebook". Man, I was wrong.

  2. GDium by blind+biker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From a cursory glance, I'd say I like this. It seems the first Linux distro that is actually tweaked to run from Flash RAM storage, rather than just a somewhat leaner generic Linux bolted on top of a SSD-based computer. Less logging, less unnecessary data to and from the storage, more stuff loaded into RAM. This is what I was hoping from the Eee PC's Xandros, but was disappointed (Xandros on the Eee PC is every bit of a normal Linux distro, with some of the less useful logfiles annoyingly and dangerously often updated).

    --
    "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  3. Re:Gayaplex? by mikael · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Looks like they mis-spelled gaia, or they tried to mix gaia with maya, and got gaya. I wonder if the school boards and PTA's are going to pick up on this one?

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  4. Re:Approx $420... by vidarh · · Score: 3, Insightful
    You miss the point. For the people buying these things, small and light are the main features. Small and light have so far usually meant ridiculously expensive (i.e. Sony Vaio expensive). What's new is laptops with tolerable performance that are small, light and price wise in "normal" laptop range or below.

    You can get lots of cheap laptops. Problem is they're usually 3.5kg+ and huge beasts that really are more like desktops in a laptop packaging.