Fair warning: This is a message of a commercial nature. It's not spam - I'm really subscribing to this list, and it's very relevant. With that disclaimer, I'll continue. I'm a co-founder of a startup company that is going to be offering Linux on Laptops. The company is Tuxtops (http://www.tuxtops.com), and we're doing our official product launch at Linux World Expo in February. We want to be strongly committed to the idea that Linux should be the best operating system available for laptops. And, quite frankly, it isn't there yet. It is very difficult to find a laptop that installs cleanly out of the box, all the drivers work, X and sound are easy to configure, and so forth. Not to mention various unsupported or undersupported features, like USB, IR ports, and other hardware that often shows up in laptops. Technology also changes rapidly in the laptop market, making it difficult to get Linux on a leading edge laptop, creating a lag time between when something works for Windows and when it finally works for Linux. We want to change this. We want to write drivers to support the latest and greatest laptops. We want to write software to do things like good mobile network management and good power management. We want to release this code under the GPL, and make Linux work better on all laptops, not just ours. Other linux companies are very focused on the server market, and don't have the time to invest in laptops. This is a niche that we believe can be well filled. We aren't taking orders yet, and are finalizing the details of the first set of laptops we'll be carrying. We will have a Premium, a Standard, and an Ultralight model for our initial product launch. The laptops will come shipped with Red Hat Linux configured with X working, with sound drivers that work, and in a generally ready-to-run state. We expect to start shipping the first week in February. We will be hiring people, particularly people who are experts at device drivers on laptops, in the near future. We don't have any openings immediately, however. Thank you for your time. Come see us at Linux World Expo, if you can. -- Kirby Krueger, CIO, Tuxtops.
