HP has pulled out of supporting its netbooks with the Linux OS, stating that its customers only want Windows XP devices. This announcement came at the same time as the company put final plans together for its HP MiniNote 1000 Series. With a list price of £400 this isn’t quite the entry-level price point people were hoping for, so dropping Linux seems a logical choice.
On one level, this was to be expected from HP as its main business is selling to the corporate markets, where Linux offers less flexibility. However, there does seem to be a streamlining of choice in the whole netbook market, so perhaps HP is simply playing the numbers game?
Solely offering Windows XP is nothing new. Samsung has never supported Linux and to-date has claimed that it would never release anything but a Windows-based device due to driver and platform support issues.
However, you’ll still find plenty of support for the Linux OS, with Asus, Acer and Toshiba still clearly supporting the platform in its range of devices. Acer recently had to go down on record that an Linux version of its Acer 10 Aspire One would indeed be shipping along the standard Windows XP version.
So, is the Linux netbook a dying breed - do you own one but wish you’d backed Windows XP instead? Let us know.
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I have just made an experience in my MacBook:
I downloaded a disk image from XUbuntu (a lightweight version of Ubuntu) and installed it in a virtual machine with 512Mb RAM.
The installation was easy, and in a few minutes I was playing with this simple and good-looking desktop. It looks like a modern operating system, without the bells and whistles.
I opened Firefox (browser), Thunderbird (email client), Abiword (word processor) and Gnumeric (spreadsheet), and the system continued to run fine.
That was strange, since I was using only 512Mb of RAM in a virtual machine.
Then I opened the system monitor to verify memory usage. XUbuntu and all the opened applications were using, together, 200Mb of RAM.
That’s impressive!
For sure, XUbuntu doesn’t have all the features of Windows 7 or Mac OS X, but I wouldn’t mind to use it as my netbook operating system.
Now, don’t take my word for granted. Download a disk image and experiment XUbuntu in a virtual machine with 512Mb RAM:
http://www.xubuntu.org/