HP to intro their new Mini 1000 netbook on Wednesday

XP 60GB HDD. bluetooth is available option. Nice looking unit. Available in 8.9" or 10.2" screen sizes. Outside is textured vs. glossy (nice).




http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopp ... 000_series

 

It looks rather nice, but starting at $400 which will probably be with a relatively low quality slow SSD and 512 MB of RAM.
One other problem for we folks who wipe Windows from it and replace it with Linux is that most of the time, they no longer list the chipsets. That is, we won't know if it's a card that's easy to get to work with Linux or difficult till a few people get to the stores selling them.

It's annoying for we Linux folks. It used to (it seems, at least) be easier, where at least a few retailers would give more detailed specs, including the make of the wireless card.

I'm fortunate in that I live a 20 minute train ride away from J&R, which usually carries most of these.

 

After further research I see that HP is offering these with numerous HDD/SSD options and that a linux version will be available in January. It will be a "light" version of something.

Why don't they just load Ubuntu Netbook Remix on these machines.....and be done with it? Why do these mfrs. have to make Linux so damn difficult? It's supposed to be the opposite!

 

I jokingly suggested on the Mepis forums that it was a conspiracy financed by MS, but someone took me seriously. (My own fault, I don't think I made it clear enough that I was being sarcastic.)

Your question has been asked, in various ways, all over the Internet. Maybe Canonical is charging for it, maybe their market people don't understand Linux users, maybe (and after the US financial collapse, this one strikes me as more possible than it used to) they're just freaken' stupid.

One of the netbooks shipped with a version of SuSE, and I remember reading that that too was crippled and almost guaranteed to turn people off from Linux.

Perhaps they just figure the people buying the Linux version are trying to save money and will be happiest with the most MS like experience they can make.

I really don't know--I just do think that their research and marketing people are completely out of touch with the Linux community.

 

Considering the fact that MS only charges netbook manufacturers about $26 a copy for XP Home, they really don't have the incentive to go with Linux, it's not saving them whole lot of cost to begin with. Plus Windows is a more mature system with a wide driver base and support.

 

It's always been that way with Linux as far back as I can remember . Beautiful, new machines would have to wait a year before being purchased in the community because the hardware was not listed. A real pain.

I have seen the HP (1010) and the AAO side by side and, while I was unable to check video, I must say that the HP screen technology seems great (better, brighter, clearer). Whether they have configured it as well as the AAO to run streaming video as beautifully, I don't know. The keyboard is also quite impressive although the AAO keyboard grows on me by the day. The one I tested had XP on 8Gigs SSD and was very zippy.

By the way, I saw the XP 60G unit on sale at Costco for $449 at Costco before Thanksgiving. Is this a newer model?

 

Bleh. In all it's coolness, I actually don't like it that much. I tried it out at Costco, and I don't know, but I think I've gotten too used to the AspireOne's keyboard...The Mini 1000's feels very strange to me. The $400+ price tag also is pretty stupid - considering you only get a 60GB HDD, and XP Home. Maybe it's for the nice box design?