This summer has seen a flurry of activity in the Linux Netbook market. These are machines that are small form factor, low cost, typically have solid state storage (though some have hard disks), and offer the traveler or student a light-weight machine for quick email and web. The idea started with the One Laptop Per Child project using Fedora with it's ambitious goal of putting a laptop in the hands of children the world over. The ASUS Eee PC kicked off the main stream consumer use with their Xandros Linux based system. HP has their Mini-Note, and MSI announced the Wind with both using SUSE Linux. Now it looks like Dell is going to jump in with an Inspiron Netbook running Ubuntu Linux (though they already have several low cost Ubuntu notebooks).
This is an exciting time for massive Linux growth amongst the typical world notebook, laptop, and netbook consumer user. Many users are finding these machines the perfect answer to a low-cost, reliable mail and web tool. What an exciting time for the Linux Foundation and the Linux Standard Base to help establish Linux as the mainstream choice for a user's reliable use of the World Wide Web. As we look to future versions of the LSB standard I hope we take into account the massive growth in this area and help third-party ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) target new and exciting applications to this growing platform base.
