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."

netbooks

[zogger]

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.

GDium

[blind biker]

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:Gayaplex?

[mikael]

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?

Re:Ewwww....

[reset_button]

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:Approx $420...

[vidarh]

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.

I gave up on netbooks...

[Jorophose]

The day that VIA claimed its Nano is only for 10"+ laptops...

That and the fact that the HP Mininote has all the potential to be the best subnotebook... But the screen is too glossy (they need to have a matte option), the thing gets pretty hot, the CPU is not very good for the task, and not to mention the exact same laptop (except maybe there's no speakers on the side of the screen for the Dell?) but the Dell happens to be 64-bit and 200$ cheaper... VIA needs to swoop in and supply them with cheap nanos, or they're going to die against the Atom.

This new mandriva laptop doesn't look too great. For 400$+ it's really exorbitant pricing. What advantage does this have over an Asus eee901, really now? I can remove my SSD (I think) and use a flash drive as a boot device... And the only real advantage I can see to having your OS on a stick like this is if you get robbed; but even then if you can yank out a USB flash drive out of a thief's hands as he runs off with your laptop, why couldn't you just hold onto the laptop?