Lately there's been a lot of talk about Asus' ultra-small laptop called the Eee PC.  Eee stands for Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play.  I think it should have a fourth E which would stand for Easy to lose because the thing is tiny but that's beside the point.  It's not exactly a powerhouse of a machine but the Eee PC is a great business portable that lets you do some basic things like word processing, internet browsing, and make Skype calls.  This is all done from a homebrew of the Xandros linux distribution, but drivers for Windows XP are included (so you can install XP on it).  The best part about it is that it's only $400, which shows that these UMPC's are finally getting into a reasonable price range.  I think paying $2,000 for a limited-function machine that you'll use sparingly isn't a great investment, but if the prices continue to drop these things could catch on quick.  The Eee PC has a 7" display, a 900mhz processor, 512 megabytes of ram and a 4 gigabyte flash drive.  These specs seem pretty miniscule but remember this is not a machine you're going to be doing any serious gaming or development with.  If you want to learn more check the un-boxing video below, I thought it was pretty interesting.

So now that you know all about the Eee PC I must tell you Asus has gotten into trouble because of it.  I said above that the Eee PC runs a distribution of linux similar to Xandros, and if you're familiar with linux and how it's developed you know that it's all open source.  Because of this, developers adhere to a license called the General Public License (GPL) which basically states that the source code for your project must be distributed freely.  Asus must have forgotten about this bit because, though they claim to offer the project's source code on their website, people are having trouble using it to modify the Eee PC's operating system.  This has caused some turmoil in the community as everyone's assuming that the code offered is not really the whole project.   You can bet that Asus will either explain how to circumvent their laptop's software or just release the full bit of source code fairly soon.

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