It's a nice idea, probably good for students. I think sales will be limited because people can buy 10inch netbooks with Windows/Linux already for next to nothing.

Linux geeks, please make a nice front end that sets up mail, internet etc easily and intuitively. Something that looks like iphone, windows 7, HTC's phone interface.

Take those 3 and make the best of the parts. Put that as a general front end for Linux and you have a global winner on your hands.

Please Linux dudes and dudettes, make it happen. Make Linux into a real alternative for the masses with a pretty front end.

I took a look at those drivers. As soon as you can get the source to rt73.bin (which is a binary blob in the source tarball), then yes, you will have found the first 100% open source driver

Wonder if you could explain a little more ?

As far as I know Ralink drivers are available as source for Linux. Haven't looked-up the license but as long as the source is available...

Since there is no 100% open source wireless driver, all have binary blobs regarding the radio so that people don't exceed FCC guidelines.

Cue the "Binary Blobs aren't all evil, just Nvidia's" comments from the pimply faced apologists.

Infernoz: "You can get really cheap full Intel Atom PCs and cheap Atom ION PCs now, and it isn't that hard to load an OS e.g. Windows or Linux, so this machine does not look competitive."

Half the battle is getting the damn things without Windows preloaded (or some weird Linux distro from some obscure Taiwanese company on various netbooks). The other half of the battle is making sure that the chipset really is supported by open drivers (not one-off proprietary drivers), which hasn't been the case for some of the Atom chipsets.

I agree with Frihet: everything including the BIOS should be open.

will not compete with home brew or even off the shelf PCs which can be had with higher spec for the same money.

Tell me again, which part of what they have done is not "taking a stock PC, putting a Linux distribution on it and punting it out the door". Am I missing something here? All they have done is selected well supported hardware which is what anyone building a Linux (or any PC for that matter) should and would do. Is the "clever twist" that they have not used nVidia hardware as the drivers are not open source?

I realize that compromise is often necessary.Open Sparc would be ideal, Intel is OK. It's the BIOS that worries me. Where is an open BIOS? How is it the user manual is copyrighted? Time to start over, guys..

You can get really cheap full Intel Atom PCs and cheap Atom ION PCs now, and it isn't that hard to load an OS e.g. Windows or Linux, so this machine does not look competitive.

A serious drawback of this machine is the Intel chipset, the GPU is pathetic for high resolution video; it should have used at least an ION or ION2 chipset mobo!