Ubuntu Linux Distributor Canonical has revealed that Ubuntu is now available preloaded on the new Asus Eee PC series.
Asus has been busy of late. It used the recent Computex IT conference in Taipei to unveil new devices including its hybrid Padfone, plus a slew of other new Asus products.
And now three Asus Eee PC models, 1001PXD, 1011PX and 1015PX, are available with Ubuntu 10.10 pre-installed. More models pre-loaded with the open source operating system will be made available later this year.
Ubuntu 10.10 comes with a complete office suite that offers easy integration with traditional Microsoft Office products. Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Flash are also pre-installed.
“Since its creation, the Asus Eee PC has provided, and continues to provide the best cloud computing experience to users, while Ubuntu is an open source OS renowned for its customisability and stability,” said Stanley Chang, product director at Asus. “To fulfil the various needs of a diverse market and user base, the strategic alliance with Ubuntu is absolutely a win-win cooperation.”
Despite all the positive noises from Asus executives, there had been concern that the company’s commitment to Linux was waning.
When Asus first launched its original Eee PC 701 back in 2007, it ran Xandros Linux but, in the end, most users opted to run Windows XP amid reports of user problems and high returns on the Linux-running machines.
Indeed, this led one Microsoft executive, Brandon LeBlanc, a Windows communications manager, to announce, on the Windows Experience Blog back in April 2009, that Windows ran on 96 percent of netbooks, although some disputed his claims.
Besides recently launching its Android-based Padfone which has been dubbed a “convergent device” that combines a smartphone and a tablet computer into one symbiotic gadget, Asus also remains publicly committed to Intel’s MeeGo operating system and Microsoft Windows.
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Unity stinks so far, and gnome has never been my thing, especially on a netbook CPU...but Lubuntu is twice as fast, easy enough to install, and runs basically the same stuff if you've got some tech savy or want to put out $20 to $30 for a USB DVD drive(Polaroid has a portable DVD+-RW DL writer that goes nicely with any netbook). I run Lubuntu 11.04 on the original 701 EEEPC Netbook with 512mb ram and 2GB SSD and 8gb SDHC (use SSD for swap) and it runs quite well as a media box (USB Television/pandora/etc) and libreoffice device.
Xandros stunk, but by cutting out parts of XP I was able to run XP compressed on the 2gb SSD drive up until a year ago when the security updates just got too large to fit anymore. XP doesn't natively support installation to to an SDHC card, so it was time for a change. It's worked out great!