My first question is in regard to the new Asus Eee PC 70x series of laptops getting ready for release. What is the life expectancy of the SSD drives? The operating system that comes with it is a slightly modified version of Xandros, but I would be looking to install Debian on it. Which brings me to my next question... does anyone know if their BIOS will support booting from a USB DVD-ROM?

My last question is about Quad Core processor. I know of Linux having good support for Dual core processors, but what about Quad Core? My gut tells me that support will be just fine, but I would like to know if anyone has any personal experience and what happened. Thanks for your input.

Regards,

Brandon

SMP kernels don't give a damn - they'll use as many engines as you throw at them.
My 4 way Xeon servers work on the same distro as my q6600 quad-core.

Only if “as many” is less than 1024 (which ought to be enough for anybody .

Thanks for the responses on the processor. Anybody got anything on the solid state drives?

Regards,

Brandon

The OLPC computer with SSD and cheap components is designed to last at least 5 years.

Here is an interesting article about using flash memory for swap space. Flash memory is supposed to level out writes over available space. One observation in the article is that, assuming a life of 100,000 writes, and completely overwriting available space every hour, it should still last eleven years. Add in some sophisticated error-correction, and it could be much longer. It would still be a good idea to tune the o/s to avoid unnecessary system-related writes.

I would think the biggest problem will be getting hold of an eee at a price that makes it look like a worthwhile alternative to a standard notebook PC.

For example, mount volumes with the noatime option.