ultralite linux laptop?
 

mostly thinking out loud here, but would enjoy hearing what you all think....

We were talking about some of the advances in flash cards at work the other day, and it got me thinking a little. I'm sure this has occurred to others here too, but with some of the live CD versions of LINUX out there (Knoppix, Gnoppix, Berry, etc...) it would seem to me that some industrious company could market a really light, small laptop with very low power consumption without a HD, floppy, CD or DVD drive. The whole base system & all the software anyone would really need could fit on a 1/2 gig on a flash card if it could be set up as bootable. If the card was a full gig, then that would leave a lot of space for documents, etc. USB jump drives are commonly around 1/2 a gig at the moment and getting larger, so they could easily replace the other types of removable media.

Might be a rather slick little system. Perhaps a 12" screen, a rather smallish battery, a couple of flash card ports, perhaps a built-in wireless connection like the one the new iMacs use, etc... Perhaps use a PPC chip to reduce power consumption further...

Obviously, this wouldn't be a computer for gaming or whatever, but it might end up being a nice little device for taking about town to coffee shops, library, etc. and be rather low cost.

I think it would also be good for Business men, and schools. For most cases Business Men/Women don't need masive amounts of storage and the cost would be right in their alley. Schools could offer it to their students for a very low cost. Or even just lend them out. Very interesting good idea, but I don't think it wil come about. To small of a market. The way things are going (as I see them) is mltitasking. Everyone wants a portable computer that can do every thing their Desktop can. Also many people are getting them as mobile media centers. Playing moviesand music while they are on trips or what ever they are doing.

But as I said I think it is a great idea, I would acualy be interested in getting one my self. (Dependig on the cost)

Flash memory access times are incredibly slow... Might make it impractical. Perhaps faster than CD, though -- then you could argue faster than a liveCD. But is that still usable?

Great idea, though.

--Shade

I think it would be usable for light apps. Simple word processors, light web browsers. The OS used would have to be tailored to the pc but I don't see it being to much of an issue.

I also think the next generation of Hard Drives are going to be solid state memory, but that is a discussion for another thread and another day.

The other thing is that flash memory has a much shorter life span than a hard drive -- the number of times you can write to a flash drive is drastically fewer than other media. However, it's better in a couple of other ways: no hard drive spin-up and less power consumption.

--Shade

I'm running Linux on a 12" 3.5lb laptop with only a hard disk. I used to have a regular laptop and PDA and always eneded up needing something that wasn't on the pda so I would have to go get the laptop so a couple years ago I saw this one with no removable drives and small size and weight and bought it and sold the old laptop and pda and now use this laptop as my only system. Its basically close to what you are suggesting except that I run from hard disk instead of flash since I have several G of documents on it.

You have to remember that most of the power consumption in laptops goes towared lighting up the LCD and spinning the fans.

It is possible to make an ultralight linux laptop with IBM micro drives for HDs but that would be impractical from a storage space perspective.

Also you would have to manufacture all custom parts. Sort like the wearable PC the MIT geeks wear around in Boston.

But keep dreaming maybe you find a way.

Thorn

Yep, wearable is my next step. I didn't do wearable this time because I was still running Windows and it takes lots of cpu and ram. With Linux being efficient it makes a wearable more possible.
Modern laptop drives are pretty efficient. I have old 300M laptop drives that pull almost 1A, then 3G that run 500-750mA and my 60G runs 250-500mA. I could play with HDparm and have it shut down a lot if needed. 12" display uses less power then the big 15" that most people want in a laptop and the PIII 1GHz is pretty cool, the fan rarely kicks on.

What is the Manufacturer of your laptop? I might look into it as well, I am wanting to buy one.

Mine is a Dell C400 that I bought as bare as I could and added the ram, drive, and wireless myself. The C400 has been replaced by the D400 and they have one thinner and lighter (x200/300) but it didn't work with the dell standard C or D series drives.
Other brands have similar, what you want to do is look at the business user laptops instead of the home user laptops. The home user ones, to be cheap tend to have desktop processors and bigger cases with wasted space inside and have the big displays (maybe home users have bigger laps?). The corporate lines usually have one ultraportable. I also looked into tablets but at the time that were big and heavy too.
Most people tend to think you have to have dvd and floppy drives in laptops so the laptops are all big and heavy, the Dell sales rep even tried to talk me out of the C400, telling me this was designed to be portable and had no internal drives so I had to explain that I am a contrator and carry my laptop everywhere and use it as a PDA so I want small and light and don't care to watch dvd's on it and crap like that.