Many of these netbooks run on a Intel Atom processor which simply cannot handle the load generated by bloated Vista. I also think that a lot of users don't want XP either because the purchase of this operating system increases the cost of these relatively inexpensive computers by 25% or more. The proliferation of netbooks has created a real opening, at least for the team being, for non-Microsoft operating systems. My guess is that Microsoft is not taking this development lying down and will eventually release a leaned down and inexpensive version of Vista or Windows 7 to compete in this space.
I am no software engineer, but Vista is such a huge bloated OS, that sounds like a tall order -- perhaps sort of like axing a 400 lb. dewd to slim down to become a welter weight fighter.
It seems to me that with the release of Vista and its problems, M-soft has all but advertised to the rest of the industry, "Please come and take some of our market share and kick our a**es." LOL
The Acer Aspires we bought for the lab were $350 (1 GB ram, 120 GB HDD, Windows XP). Plenty cheap enough for me.
You're not going to find much as there is virtually no need for it. The user gets most if not all of their apps (of thousands that are available) from a repository using a package manager that performs the installation for them, thereby eliminating one major vector for malware. Ubuntu uses Firefox instead of IE, thereby eliminating another vector. The OS itself is written more securely from the ground up, requiring the user to affirmatively make a downloaded file executable with a user permission system that is effective without relentlessly pestering the user. If the user runs the downloaded file and it does do something untoward, its influence is limited to the user's own home directory, as opposed to the whole system.
Additionally, you'd be hard pressed to find malware that even runs on a Linux system as almost all of it is written to exploit holes in Windows. Market share and therefore benefit to the hacker is an explanation with some merit for the discrepancy, but one that ignores the number of internet facing Linux servers that would reap the malware writer rewards several orders of magnitude greater than Windows desktops if they could only be exploited.
How 'bout Win 7 on an ASUS Eee?
So far you don't need it./...and there is CLAM I belive....that is free and downloadable...it's antivirus....
Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates. The core of the package is an anti-virus engine available in a form of shared library.(Read more...)