Mobile Linux: Features

For some users, the new generation of ultraportable notebooks comes close to embodying the Holy Grail for road warriors. Their laptop-like keyboards make them more usable for typing tasks than smart phones, but they are lighter and cheaper than traditional laptops. The original Asus Eee PC, for instance, cost about US$400 and weighed about two pounds when it was introduced last October.

A new generation of mobile Web browsers is finally making the Web a reality on handheld devices.

Compact, powerful, innovative, new browsers give you more choices than ever before.

One day after the resignation of the One Laptop Per Child's president was publicly revealed, the educational project's founder and chairman says the group's XO laptop may evolve to use only Windows XP as the operating system, with open-source educational apps such as its home-built Sugar running on top.

When the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program was first announced in 2005, media attention centered on two aspects: the US$100 price tag and the humanitarian nature of the project. Three years later, the environmental genius of these award-winning laptops still not only burns bright but even inspires copycats. Vendors such as Asustek and Via are working to bring their own low-cost, low-power computing devices to emerging markets and education.

Linux enthusiasts like to point out just how scalable the system is; Linux runs on everything from pocket-size devices to supercomputers with several thousand processors. What they talk about a little bit less is that, at the high end, the true scalability of the system is limited by the sort of workload which is run. CPU-intensive scientific computing tasks can make good use of very large systems, but database-heavy workloads do not scale nearly as well. There is a lot of interest in making big database systems work better, but it has been a challenging task. Nick Piggin appears to have come up with a logical next step in that direction, though, with a relatively straightforward set of core memory management changes.