So far, Ubuntu is outpacing Debian on the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450 that I resurrected from the dead by replacing its shattered power plug.

It's hard to believe, but It's was exactly six months ago this week that I picked up a black ASUS Eee PC 700 laptop. At just 4GB of internal storage and a 900MHz Celeron processor, the little book-sized laptop definitely has its limitations, but I'm not looking to replace it with anything soon, except maybe a newer model of the same laptop.

It's been a while since I've played with Damn Small. The last time I used it regularly was on an old Gateway Solo laptop someone at work dumped on me. The fact that I could run a new OS (however small) on an ancient Pentium 3 with 16MB of RAM was a testament to its usefulness.

Thai systems integrator Norhtec is preparing to release a sub-$300 ultra-mini PC (UMPC) laptop based on a Quanta design. Aimed at the developing-country market, the so-called Gecko Laptop is being built by Quanta and runs Linpus Linux Lite, a new distribution designed for small-screen mini-PCs.

Today, I ran an upgrade of my laptop, which runs Ubuntu. A nice little feature that came with this particular upgrade is a working installation of Firefox 3. About 2 months ago, I upgraded to Firefox 3, but it was in an unusable state, so back to Firefox 2.0 I went. With this working version though, I have to say that a downgrade back to Firefox 2 won’t happen again.

About a year ago, I installed Ubuntu on the laptop owned by a friend of mine who lives back east. Here’s her Ubuntu story … back in 2007, and today.

I like to back up the data on my laptop computer as often as possible, just in case I have trouble with it. I have some large files on the laptop that prevent me from scheduling an Internet backup to my home machine, so I have written a script that reminds me to periodically plug in an external USB drive; then upon clicking continue, the reminder script runs my custom backup script.

Color me surprised. Dana Blankenhorn, a well-known writer about Linux and open source recently asked for someone—anyone–to send him a loaner Linux laptop to replace his now dead Windows laptop. What, he didn’t already have one?

If your laptop hinge broke after a few months you might expect a warranty repair. This guy discovered to his horror that the biggest IT superstore in the UK would not repair his laptop because he had installed Linux. But then the story started getting really bizarre.