China, which has long wished to develop its own computer industry, has chosen to go with Linux on the software side. Loongson is its hope for the hardware side.

Many tech-news websites spent the past couple of weeks betting on AMD introducing a new processor line aimed at the currently red-hot netbook market. For those unfamiliar with the term, a netbook is a class of laptop computer inspired by the OLPC project. In short, a netbook is a laptop computer with a sub 10inch viewing LCD, a solid state hard-drive, limited memory, and a low-end processor.

Dutch integrator Van Der Led (VDL) Designs has announced a clone of the Asus Eee PC ultra-mini PC (UMPC) notebook. The WiFi-enabled "Jisus" UMPC is equipped with a Chinese-made 1GHz Loongson CPU, has an 8.9-inch display, and runs Ubuntu Linux.

For quite some time I’ve been intrigued by Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix (UNR), but I’ve never given it a shot up until now. Being a KDE guy, I usually lean toward applications based on the Qt toolkit and I’ve never really liked GNOME much. For some reason though, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix has been lingering in my mind for a potential review, and now I’ve finally been able to give it a shot.

One month after the One Laptop Per Child charity went into mass production with its $188 laptop, the Peruvian government has signed a contract to purchase 260,000 units.

Late last month, Ubuntu 8.04 arrived on the scene, right on time, right on its six-month refresh cycle and readily available via a simple ISO image file download. While that may have been big news for the Linux community, the question remains, what if any impact will this latest release have on mainstream computer users?

It has taken more than two years, but the One Laptop Per Child initiative has finally released its much-anticipated laptop: the OLPC XO-1. The XO-1 costs $200 each to donate, but for a limited time — until Dec. 31, 2007 — people can avail themselves of the "Give One, Get One" promotion to give a $399 donation ($200 of which is tax-deductible).

"China should be an obvious beneficiary of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Scheme, which seeks to provide robust $100 portable Internet computers to children in developing countries."

I love my little “netbook” laptop computer, barely the size of a small hardcover book. But running programs on it turned out to be more frustrating than I’d imagined. Why not take Windows off my netbook and replace it with Linux, just like I’d done with the old laptop?