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A netbook is a light-weight, cheap, energy-efficient mini notebook computer perfect for web browsing, email, word processing, listening to music, watch movies and play some simple games like chess on the run. Netbooks usually weigh in at about 1kg, feature a 7″ – 10″ diagonal LCD screen, longer battery life, a smaller keyboard, and a webcam.
The first netbook is Asus Eee 701 which comes with Xandros Linux operating system. It can start and be on the Internet in about 20 seconds. However the Xandros interface and software update is not the best.
Even if you can run XP on it, it runs slower especially with other software like anti-virus, anti-spamware, firewall installed. With a 4Gb of drive and 512 Mb of RAM, it is struggling.
I tried to put on some other Linux on it and most of them worked OK. Among the distributions I tried are Eeebuntu, Puppeee, and Cruncheee.
All of them worked perfectly in Eee 701. While Eeebuntu takes up most space in the drive (with only 1Gb left), Puppee takes up minimal space (hardly any) and works like lightning, and Cruncheee works best for me.
It’s based on Ubuntu and you can install any software from its repository. It works out of the box. Everything you need is there, and best of all free.
But why do you need a netbook?
A netbook is typically you second or third computer. Most people use their computers for web browsing, email, word processing, photo management, music, video, online messaging (messenger, skype etc), shopping and blogging.
A netbook can handle all of the above easily. It is light and high portable. The price is around $300 for the basic models.
It borrows the idea of the rugged one PC per child project. It is hot at the moment. And in this recession time, it is even hotter. More netbooks will appear in the market soon, and most of them will be running on a Linux distribution.
Some so-called netbooks are not really netbooks as they are too pricy, too bulky, or too fragile (with a hard disk).
They should be less than $300 in price, about 1 kg in weight, with good battery life and small and portable enough to be carried around for travelling, school etc.
