Linpus Launches Linux Distribution Aimed at Cheap UMPCs

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from Linux Watch says that Linpus Technologies, a company well known in Taiwan for its Linux distributions, wants to become a major player on the Linux market with Linpus Linux Lite, a distro that features a dual-mode user interface.

Linpus Linux Lite is a commercial distro aimed at cheap UMPCs like Eee PC, Cloudbook or Classmate PC. It can run very well on a machine with a CPU at 500 MHz, 128 MB of RAM and 512MB of hard disk space. The desktop was specially designed for 7-inch screens. At the same time, Linpus Linux Lite comes with a nice stack of open source applications, like OpenOffice.org.

The two modes of the user interface are Easy and Normal. Easy mode has large, colorful icons and arranges software in terms of its use, grouping the applications in tabs: internet, work, learn, play and settings. If you want a traditional PC interface, you can switch to Normal mode, which takes you to a KDE 3.5.x desktop. The functional approach might be inspired from gOS 2.0, where both Internet and office applications are built around Google's online software suite.

Warren Coles, Linpus' sales and marketing manager, said: "Our objective with this product was to create an operating system that offered choice and addressed specifically the ease-of-use needs of end users of UMPC [Ultra-Mobile PC] devices. If you are using a small screen, if you are a child, older person or inexperienced user, you will find the icon interface particularly helpful."

Coles added, speaking on how Linpus provides support for hardware vendors:"Specifically, we provide unprecedented levels of support for hardware vendors - and we recently pioneered our own preload solution and have worked extremely hard to create stable sleep and suspend modes for notebooks. By having operating system, application and driver teams working side by side, in close proximity to the hardware manufacturers, we offer tremendous quality, value and time-to-market strengths."