ARM-Powered Linux Laptops Unveiled At Computex

Charbax writes "At Computex in Taipei on June 2-6th, several companies unveiled ARM-powered laptops that are cheaper ($99 to $199), last much longer on a regular 3-cell battery (8-15 hours) and can still add cool new features such as a built-in HDMI 720p or 1080p output, 3D acceleration, connected standby and more. The ARM Linux laptops shown as working prototypes at Computex will run Ubuntu 9.10 (optimized for ARM), Google Android, Xandros OS for ARM, or some Red Flag Linux type of OS. In this video, the Director of Mobile Computing at ARM, is giving us all the latest details on the status for the support of full Flash (with all actionscripts), the optimizations of the web browser (accelerating rendering/scrolling using the GPU/DSP), the stuff that Google is working on to adapt Android 2.0 Donut release for laptop screens and interfaces and more. At Computex I also filmed an interview with the Nvidia team working on Tegra laptops, the Qualcomm people working on Snapdragon devices and the Freescale people doing their awesomely thin ARM laptops in cooperation with manufacturers such as Pegatron as well."

Comments

Price?

[siloko]

Nowhere in the article does it mention $99. The quote is "Some of the ARM-based systems will sell for as little as $199." Now $199 is pretty cheap but that is a starting price and will unlikely be the mean let alone allowing for $99 units. The summary is misleading.

Re:Will they run Linux? RTFA dude, they do!

[Tubal-Cain]

Get Wine on there ASAP and you're away for a good number of Win apps too...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that Wine doesn't translate across architectures. Any windows apps you hope to run on Wine would need to be compiled for Wine from source. So all ARM/Wine apps will either:

• Be compiled for a Windows ARM port. But switching to ARM would be a good opportunity for Microsoft to make a clean break of backwards compatibility, perhaps with an entirely new OS line. Perhaps one called 'Chairs'?
• Be an open source app compiled in ARM. Seeing as most open source apps are already ported to Linux, using Wine on ARM would have novelty value only.

Re:Will they run Linux?

[Theolojin]

Well, they're not going to run Windows any time soon. Good opportunity here. I hope the application availability is going to be good - as a Nokia Tablet user I've been running a variant of Linux on a ARM processor for some time now and I can't wait to get my hands on a ARM netbook.

For all the fun poked at Debian for having such lengthy release cycles, I, for one, am glad that ARM is a fully-supported architecture. (Part of the reason for the long release cycles is each supported platform must be ready for the release.) I could have essentially the same setup on my x86-based laptop as I could on an ARM-based laptop. In other words, application availability really isn't an issue when it comes to the ARM platform.