Mandriva Joins the Netbook Market With the GDium

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."

finally, something that has potential to show

That's great, Mandriva is my ever fav linux distro, if I just want something that's readily prepared for me... Those guys have a lot of innovative ideas, and I'm glad to see there's something better than my EeePC's tortured Xandros....

Gayaplex?

From the site:

10.
1024×600.
1.1Kg.
4 hours.
Mandriva Linux.
G-Key.
Gayaplex.

I understood the first six things on the list. But what the heck is a "Gayaplex"? I'm going to assume that it doesn't mean what its spelling implies...

Re:Gayaplex?

Looks like Gayaplex is what they call their forthcoming social networking/educational "portal": http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:6V7GNDpoU-YJ:www.gdium.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/gdium_announcement-en.pdf+Gayaplex&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us [64.233.183.104]

Re:Gayaplex?

Here I thought it was some special Mac OS X emulator...

Re:Gayaplex?

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?

netbooks

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.

Re:netbooks

Well, the 9'' Eees are already pushing what's usable in that form factor anyway. Extended use of its keyboard makes an unhappy me.

The extra inch of the 1000 series makes all the difference in the world. But you lose some of teh tinies and teh cuteness.

It's a tradeoff.

Re:

Unfortunately, ASUS quickly figured out that there are plenty of people with more disposable dollars than sense when it comes to pricing of small, personal electronics. Still, I remember when simple calculators cost a *lot* of money -- eventually, the same value drop will have to occur with mini puters. I hope.

Re:netbooks

Yeah, but at least they're becoming way more usable. The small low-res screen, shitty keyboard, low storage and relatively poor battery life made sure I wasn't getting myself the EEE 4G/700. Now Dell is coming up with the $299 "E" laptop [engadget.com] which appears to be what the EEE should've been all along, and I'm rather interested.

No matter how many unpaid overtime hours the Chinese kids work, there still is a certain price floor at the current technological level. I'd be quite satisfied if they just kept improving the product at the current price range until it's feasible to go lower without producing something completely useless.

Here ya on useability

Very good point, surfing today takes a bit more power than ten years ago for sure. That's why I wanted to upgrade my backup machine, that PB1400m that is a 1997 model, just not enough processor or RAM to be of much use for much longer. Thankfully you can still get an iCab browser for it that works pretty fair. Thanks for the link to that new Dell review! Getting closer! I'm still going to hold out a bit longer though, joe cheap here, heh.

GDium

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).

Re:

Also, while not advertised it uses the MIPS-derived Loongson CPU. I don't know how it compares to Intel's ultraportable offerings performance-wise but I really like affordable non-x86 systems.

Come to think of it, nobody can install XP on MIPS and this is A Good Thing (TM).

Loaded with homoerotic terms...

Use MANdriva Linux to login to our Gayaplex using your Gkey?

Come out with your Gdium!

A Comparison

With a half pound more and a FireWire flash key (from Micromat) you can boot the MacBook Air with reliability & speed and a 13" screen, and an internal hard drive to use however you want (encrypted data or take it out).

There are new things coming and I think these options are good.

Re:

Ahem...I misstated in a FireWire flash key. Indeed you need to use a USB key on the MacBook Air.

FireWire Flash key is used on my Mac Book Pro.

Approx $420...

Humbug.

I can live with cute, small, slow & quirky if it's CHEAP.

I can live with cute, small, fast & innovative if it's CHEAP.

$420 is refurb "normal" laptop range. I REALLY want a cheap laptop/notepad/"wtf is that thing?", but I want cheap.

Re:Approx $420...

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.

Re:Approx $420...

Bear in mind that that pricing probably includes the VAT, which non-Europeans won't have to pay. That brings the price down a little closer to, say, an EEE 701 (I paid a little under $375CAD for my 701 including 5% GST). So if that price is correct, it's competitive with other netbooks. I might grab one just to have a MIPS machine to play with. I also installed Mandriva on my EEE and am quite happy with it, so that's icing on the cake.

Well it's certainly a niche

It's not a value proposition. It's something else. Because I can get a 'real' notebook, somewhat more clunky and heavy, such as a Lenovo R61 with SuSE Linux pre installed for $700. For $636 you can get Vista, remove it and install your own Linux.

Re:Well it's certainly a niche

These devices fit in the bag I use to and from work, and about 1-1.2kg extra doesn't bother me. A "normal" laptop doesn't fit with all the other stuff I carry around, and weigh too much. The size difference also means a great deal when traveling in terms of how much extra space I get in my carry on for other items (which means less likelihood of having to check in a bag, which means less time wasted at the airport, which makes me a hell of a lot happier about business travel)

So let me get this straight...

As I understand this, the root partition is stored on the machine's internal ROM. The user's home folder sits on the USB key, along with something that somehow links to /etc/passwd to provide authentication. The key is automatically mounted when inserted. Correct me if I'm wrong.

This doesn't sound particularly promising - it would be very easy to lose the key. I also fail to see why, when most ultra-sub-notebooks are bought by a person for their use, and their use only.

Also, will the home folder on the key be accessible when plugging into another computer, say, a desktop running OS X, Windows or another Linux distro? If so, it would kind-of defeat the object. Emtec would be entering the market very late, so they can't expect this to take the market by storm. If it doesn't, it kind-of defeats the object of sticking everything on a USB key.

Re:

What's worse is that USB keys are generally unreliable. If you're running your OS off one with all of the data I can easily imagine some important blocks becoming unaccessible in 6-12 months. As it is, I won't store anything I don't have backed up on one of these things.

Re:

Yea of course it's anectodal, but I lost my data off 4 of them within 6 months, used for taking files to/from work. That's enough of a reason for me not to store my OS on one.

Re:

No, I meant my story was anecdotal.
That being said, none of the dozens of USB keys I use for work (FAT32) have suffered a single file loss.

Re:

i have a FAT formatted usb drive, and windows XP refuses to format it as anything other than fat, or fat 32...

Go hunt down the command line FORMAT command; you can use this to format the USB key as NTFS. If you're working off one, like I used to do, this makes all the difference. Not only is it much more robust it also supports things like symlinks, proper access flags, compressed files, etc. *And* with an NTFS file system XP will let you turn off the option to flush the cache after every write, which vastly speeds things up. (You just have to remember to unmount it before removing the device.)