From the point of view of the OS, there's really nothing different about these micro-ATX boxes from their larger sized brothers. Installing and running say, Mandrake or Suse on it would be no different.
Exactly. Thus my idea is to install Linux and sell them to gadget-philes who'd rather use preconfigured equipment.
Linux user friendliness has indeed improved tremendously, but the essence of the OS for me is still about having access to the internals and being able to peek at and tweak them when you want/need to(*). Thus, wouldn't a Linux box would be quite the anti-thesis of what a lifestyle techie is looking for? Someone who's not willing to install is likely to be just as unwilling to learn to tweak.
But I guess you never know. It may be possible to capitalize on the geek 'branding'. I.e. There are some out there who would like others to see them as 'techie' just because they're running Linux (even if they didn't know how to install it... LOL!)
Cynical... but I guess you're counting on the fact that successful marketing often is. :-D
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[ * SIDEBAR: Remarkably enough, you can do a fair amount of this from Windows. As someone who is very comfortable with Linux, I still find it more comfy to do development work under The Dark Side's OS. ( My mongrel setup has a lot of *nix/GNU tools though - they work great under 'Doze and I end up getting the best of both worlds. )
In a testament to how cool X's design is, you will find that it is quite easy to make your X Window apps - Gtk, Qt, WINGs, etc. based, it doesn't matter - running on a *nix box across the network... display and interact with you seamlessly as rootless windows on a Windows desktop.
Even for the development of most end-user X-Window based apps running under Linux, I find there are practical reasons for wanting to do it from an X-Window session hosted on a Windows machine. ]
-- ========================================= reply-to: a n d y @ n e t f x p h . c o m
GNU GPL: Free as in herpes -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
