Mandriva Joins the Netbook Market With the GDium 122
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."
Re:netbooks (Score:3, Interesting)
So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Well it's certainly a niche (Score:4, Interesting)
tradeoff (Score:2, Interesting)
ya, but already at the same price or getting more than a regular 14 inch laptop I can snag at local wallyworld off the shelf, and being a regular manual laborer, a pound or three difference means absolutely nothing to me, just not that big of a deal with me when it comes down to it, I carry around more weight than that with various tools stuck in my pockets all the time, 2 lbs or 5 lbs, meh, I don't care, 50 lbs sacks of mineral are at my low end of crap I have to move by hand all the time. I was more interested in portability with the built in battery and wireless connect action and low power and low price and comes with linux pre installed. Power goes out all the time here and my backup to run off a truck battery right now is an ancient powerbook, just thinking of getting something a little newer and more powerful for when that happens. Laptop size of today or smaller, just don't care that much as I'd be sitting right on top of the screen anyway, it can be smallish. Re; the keyboards..I wonder why they don't have a full size one that just folds out? Keep the small form factor but have a keyboard twice as big once it is opened up. Flip screen, left fold out, right fold out, done, full size. Yes it would have to be some thicker, but overall that would be nice. But...anyway..first the mega XO disappointment now these things right back up to expensive again (this new one in the article I don't see a price for yet). I'll wait, no biggee, no giant need for one, except once they get to a hundred bucks I'd get three of them-one for me and two for gifting- but at three hundred and higher I want none of them, I'd get a used newer laptop or a new one on sale at Christmas.
Re:Approx $420... (Score:4, Interesting)
no he's not.he gets the point (Score:2, Interesting)
Cheap is definetly part of the appeal of a small portable low specced computing device. In fact it is right up there in the article summary ->""Lately it's hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks -- the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC." We had small and light before, but they were expensive. The asus was an immediate hit because the original one was *loads* cheaper than anything else out there, and the OLPC XO project suffered terminal extreme dumbness and couldn't get it into gear to really hit a hundred bucks and get them out onto the market. Asus changed the cheap part of the equation, but then they got weird about it and they started moving away from the smaller part of the equation, and started bumping the price back up and making them bigger and now they are back to getting medium expensive again and are in the same price range as low end normal laptops. Yes, right now people who are buying them want that ultra lightness, but a lot more people would be buying something similar as the price goes down, and they can stay small and low specced. There's a huge market for small AND cheap, not just one or the other. One of those big companies is going to grok this and hit the market with it. Hmm, bad car analogy time! Sport! Tata motors grokked that with cars and came out with their 2500 dollar nano car. They will sell zillions of them because around the planet none of the other car companies grokked that! they were going the opposite direction, bigger, more bloat, worsening mileage, getting way too expensive. Good for some I guess, but not for everyone. Cheap is a prime criteria for a few billion people. At 25 grand, they would never get to have a new car, at 2.5 grand, it starts to get really affordable for a lot more people, and you make your profit in volume sales.
Re:netbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ewwww.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Here ya on useability (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Processor specs (Score:1, Interesting)
Here is brief descriptions of the cpu (PDF) [st.com]. It's chinese-developed 64-bit MIPS, has 2 FPUs, 2 ALUs, 64K/64K L1, 512K L2. And consumes 4W@900MHz. It has a builtin ddr2-667 memory controller, PCI-X bus and no builtin video/USB/etc.
Nice processor, but IMO Nvidia Tegra is more suitable for a netbook; Ars Technica writes: [arstechnica.com] "Tegra ... dissipates less than 300mW during HD playback." And has all peripherials integrated on the chip.
Main problem with this netbook is only 4 hours autonomous work, while 7-9 is much more suitable: I can take it to work without charder, etc.
Say something about the processor (Score:2, Interesting)