Although I can't really remember the name but the first few EeePC came with an Chinese Linux distribution which was actually a mixture of applications/toolkits (you know the file manager was Konqueror and had several GTK written apps, etc).
And those were the "early" days of the powerful Mobile OS platform known as MeeGo.
It wasn't durable and ready at that time but now after several years the MeeGo mobile OS (funded by Intel, Maemo and Nokia) is looking pretty awesome and strong!. And as a result yesterday, Asus officially released one their latest EeePC netbooks called X101 which runs MeeGo as the operating system.
The catchy thing about the X101 is actually its price. When Google boasts about their Chrome Netbooks, Asus on the other hand has come up with "something" that has...
*. 1.33 Oak Trail Intel Atom CPU.
*. 1GB of RAM/Memory.
*. Uses Intel GMA 600 GPU (since Intel has an open source friendly GPU designs... overall integration of Intel graphics are almost always better than Ati or Nvidia).
*. 10 Inch display area with 1024x600 resolution.
*. Wi-Fi
*. 2 USB ports.
*. Lithium Ion 28Whr battery (2600 mAh, 6-cell).
*. MicroSD card slot.
*. 16GB SSD drive as the main storage device.
*. Sizing at just 17.6mm, watch out Mac Book Air!.
*. Weights less than 1kg (950 grams to be precise).
and has a much lower price tag!. When considering all these decent hardware features, the X101 is gonna cost around $199 in US! (£150 in UK, but it's yet to be confirmed). There will be an option to pre-order it with Windows 7 (will rise the cost as a result - thank you Microsoft :P) as well. Anyway, I think by using MeeGo has a definite impact on the lower price without a doubt.
A little about MeeGo...
MeeGo's original name was actually Moblin. It's basically a separate Linux project under the supervision of Linux foundation and several other commercial companies such as Intel as mentioned earlier. The interface is optimized for mobile devices (you know, it's efficient and won't "waste" that precious "spaces" of these smaller touch/screens) and the UI is written using Qt toolkit. But other portions of MeeGo is written using the GTK+ and Clutter as well.
Although some portion of the OS (such as the Kernel few other parts) are released under GNU/GPL license but the whole Linux OS in general is an opensource project rather than a "true" GNU/Linux distribution. But the rest assured, it looks very very promising and totally free of charge!.
Will the X101 and MeeGo be able to impress the users??, well, I think when considering the price and the OS and the hardware features... heck ya it can! ;-).
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