Mandriva leaps into the netbook market with the Gdium

Published by awilliamson on Friday, July 18 2008 @ 10:31:49 CEST

Lately it's hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks - the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC (which, of course, Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring supports very well). Many in the community have asked if Mandriva is going to get directly involved in this market. Well, the answer is yes! Mandriva is providing the innovative operating system for the upcoming Gdium netbook system, produced by Emtec.

The first Gdium will be a netbook with a 10", 1024x600 resolution display and a battery life of four hours, weighing in at 1.1kg. The Gdium itself is an interesting system: it uses the MIPS-derived Loongson CPU by ST Microelectronics, which helps to deliver the long battery life. Most interesting, though - especially for Mandriva! - is the way the operating system and data are stored. The Gdium has no internal storage at all. The operating system and all user data are stored on a USB key, known as the G-Key, which plugs into a USB port under the keyboard, in the middle of the machine. This system lets you keep your system and data with you and use it on any Gdium system, so it's ideal for any environment where several systems will be shared among many users - like many office and education environments. There's no need to keep one particular laptop with you, just plug your G-Key into any Gdium and it will work just the same.

The operating system on the G-Key is a specially customized Mandriva Linux, developed exclusively for the Gdium. It has a customized fast boot process, just like the Eee, so the Mandriva desktop will boot up in seconds. It uses a customized, lightweight desktop environment to keep the system speedy and make the most common tasks easily accessible. It also comes with a set of licensed multimedia codecs to make sure playing music and videos won't be a problem.

At first, you will be able to plug the G-Key into any normal system and access all your personal data. In future, with larger capacity G-Keys, a standard, x86 Mandriva Flash-type system will be incorporated into the key alongside the specialized Gdium OS, so if you find yourself with your G-Key but no access to a Gdium system, you can plug your G-Key into any normal PC system, boot up a Mandriva environment, and work on your data that way. The G-Key system makes the Gdium the most flexible netbook around!

The Gdium is also designed to provide access to an online environment where users can securely engage into their digital life, build their community and find relevant, authoritative educational, knowledge content. The web portal will also allow for user-generated, peer-reviewed content, complementary services, open-source applications for download, etc. This is known as the 'Gayaplex' and you can read more about it on the GDium site. This reflects one of the Gdium's targets, the education market.

The Gdium will be available in Europe, North America and China starting in September 2008. Pricing is not yet finally confirmed but can be expected to be less than 400 Euros in Europe.