BenQ to launch Linux ultramobile device in Q2, Feb 14, 2008

Taiwan's BenQ is showing off a new user interface on an ultramobile PC that it plans to start marketing in the second quarter of this year, a spokeswoman for the company said Tuesday.

OLPC America plans to combat digital divide by distributing low-cost laptops to needy students in the U.S.

The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) and Microsoft are working together to develop a dual-boot system to put both Linux and Windows on laptops aimed at kids in developing countries, the head of OLPC said in an interview Tuesday.

Sales of Asustek Computer's Eee PC have soared in its first few months on the market, but success may be its undoing. Rivals are already developing products to compete with the low-cost laptop PC, market researcher Gartner says.

Adding Windows XP to Asustek Computer's Eee PC will double the price of the low-cost laptop compared to existing versions running Linux.

Quanta Computer, the world's largest contract laptop PC manufacturer, already has confirmed orders for one million notebook PCs for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, a company representative said Thursday.

The $100 machine will run the Linux OS on a 500MHz microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices, will be wireless broadband-ready, and contain 128MB of DRAM and 500MB of flash memory for storage.

Taiwan's parliament has voted to end its dependence on Microsoft software, demanding that the government reduce purchases from the software giant by 25 percent this year.

Taiwan Mobile, one of Taiwan's biggest mobile phone service providers, launched a trial of its 3G (third generation) network last week using a Linux operating system as its backbone, an executive at the company said Friday.

Richard Stallman, one of the main forces behind the GNU/Linux operating system and the free software movement, is in Taiwan fighting on a new front -- to get the island's PC makers to release source code for their drivers.