Mandriva moves onto mini-notes

It’s a magic trick of which Mandrake (the original namesake of Mandriva) would be proud. Take the fully-fledged Mandriva 2008 Linux distro and with a wave of the magic wand the codebase is suddenly smaller, processor and memory load is lighter and boot time is faster. Hey presto – it’s a perfect mix for netbooks.

That’s Mandriva Mini, which is now being made available to netbook manufacturers as yet another alternative to not only Windows XP but Ubuntu.

This isn’t Mandriva’s first brush with the mini-notebook category – the company partnered with Intel on the chipmaker’s Classmate PC and released a special version of Mandriva Linux Spring 2008 tuned for the Eee PC. However, in a trend that’s certain to raise the ire of some Linux enthusiasts, Mandriva Mini joins Ubuntu Remix  (a mobile-minded Ubuntu optimised for netbooks) as an OEM-only release rather than a publicly downloadable ISO image.

“It is of enormous convenience for the consumer to have their OS certified and preinstalled. If you want Ubuntu, and you want (a netbook), you can simply go and buy it” explains Gerry Carr, marketing manager at Ubuntu parent company Canonical, in an interview with Laptop magazine .

(That’s assuming you live in a country where you can buy a Ubuntu-powered netbook, of course. Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 is available in the US and Europe with a choice of Ubuntu or Windows XP but locally it’s XP all the way. HP, MSI and Lenovo have adopted the same anti-Penguinista sentiment, with overseas editions of their respective 2133, Wind and IdeaPad S10 netbooks sporting assorted Linux builds but locally locked to Windows.)

“It is likely that we will, over time, make an ISO available” admits Carr. “If you are an experienced Linux user you can go to our PPA – what we call our personal product archives. They’re basically storage repositories. There you’ll find the launcher. If you know what you’re doing and are willing to do things that we don’t recommend, you can get that PPA and put that on top of your desktop image and make it work. We make it available, but it is absolutely not recommended for someone with a Eee PC who, say, decides to get the Netbook Remix and try to make it work themselves. It can be done, but it’s not recommended for the standard user.”

Linux fans are nothing if not resourceful, however, and there’s more than one way to tweak a Tux. Xubuntu is a Ubuntu derivative “with a particular focus on low memory footprint”. Eeebuntu, as the name suggests, is a bespoke version of Ubuntu tailored for the Eee PC.

The very Web 2.0-oriented gOS was designed with low-cost Linux desktops, notebooks and now netbooks in mind, with the latest version 3 supporting Google Gadgets for Linux (hence its full name of gOS 3 Gadgets). Also lining up for the go-anywhere Linux set is Foresight Mobile Edition for netbooks and ultraportables.

If you've loaded Linux onto your netbook, we'd be interested to hear which distro you chose and what you think of it...