It wasn't even three-years ago that Asus took the concept of a cheap, small notebook and turned it into a revolution: the Linux-powered netbook. But, now, without any fanfare, Asus seems to have closed down its Linux lines at least in the United States.

For those who have forgotten, the first Asus netbook ran Linux, to be precise – Xandros. It forced Microsoft to bring the XP back from its grave. Now, Asus does not sells any Linux powered netbooks. But, is that really correct?

For the past year my netbook of choice has been the Samsung NC10 as while it shipped with stock Intel Atom hardware like other netbooks such as the Dell Mini 9 and earlier ASUS Eee PCs, the Samsung was built very well and possessed a rather large and well laid out keyboard for only being a 10.6" mobile computer. Catching my attention recently though has been the ASUS Eee PC 1201N netbook.

Late last month we published our preview of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and we shared our plans for a number of benchmarks using this netbook with Intel's Atom processor. Following our Linux desktop encryption benchmarks of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and Intel Atom N270 CPU we have a performance comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva on this low-cost netbook PC.

The Asus Eee PC 1008HA is a thin and light netbook that weighs just 2.4 pounds and measures just an inch thick. And it’s currently only available with Windows XP. But this weekend Asus did something interesting.

Asus is reportedly already planning to release their second generation Eee PC in April 2008 featuring Intel's Merom processor, reduced power consumption and no cooling fan...and will run a customized version of Linux worked out between Asus and Intel.

The original Asus Eee PC was the spark that ignited a forest fire of sub-mini notebooks from second tier providers to high end players like HP and Dell. Asus did so well with the original Eee PC they decided to release other models with similar design goals but minor tweaks of the hardware specs.

An Indian Web site has confirmed ASUS is developing a version of its Eee PC Netbook to run Google’s Android software. Personally I think the better story is what ASUS has against Ubuntu, but that’s just me.

ASUS is among the few tier-one hardware vendors that understands Linux. Of the dozens of ASUS products we have tested over the years, it is hard to remember a product from ASUS that did not work well with Linux.