Delstar DS700 7 in. Ultra Portable Netbook

[LinuxMint-4]

Delstar DS700 7 in. Ultra Portable Netbook

Has anyone seen these new breed of netbooks? K-Mart has these for $149, I saw one at the K-Mart on Route 18 in Florence KY. K-Mart had these for $119 for Black Friday.

On E-Bay these sell $88 to $119 from Hong Kong and in different colors, the HK models do not say Delstar..so they could be a "off brand" . They run Windows CE and have 300 to 533 Mhz speeds (depending what site you look at) and 128 MB ram, 2 GB solid state HD with a SD expansion port and Wifi B & G. Also noted, some sites say it runs 5.0 CE and some others say 6.0 CE.

So the question is ...has anyone bought one...and can you run some form of Linux on them and still surf and still do Wifi?

* Processor Type: VIA ARM 32bit CPU
* Processor Clock Speed :300M Hz
* Processor/Manufacturer :VIA
* Processor Model :VIA-ARM VT8500
* RAM/Technology: DRAM
* RAM Installed Size :128M
* Display Diagonal Size :7" TFT HD
* Max Resolution :800x480
* Display Technology :TFT
* Graphics Type :Integrated Graphics

# Hard Drive Type :NAND Fast Flash
# Hard Drive Capacity :2GB
# Hard Drive Spindle Speed :NAND Fast Flash
# PCMCIA Expansion :1x SDCard slot

[Claudio]

I had seen this one as well. I think it's also being sold under another name, but I don't remember. It's definitely an intriguing system, but definitely not for what it was advertised as. Gorkon had posted something on Gear Diary where he recommended against this device for the average user simply because the advertising was a bit misleading. Most people would probably overlook the fact that it mentioned the installed Windows CE, and even if they did see it they would think it was just another Windows like what they're running at home.

However, as something to hack it's definitely intriguing. Still, most x86-based netbooks are available for around the same price or just a little more with more power under the hood.

More on that Delstar:
http://www.liliputing.com/2009/11/kmart ... riday.html

[LinuxMint-4]

We kept hearing rumors that after the "One laptop per child" computer was released that there will be a true $100 netbook/laptop due to be released at some point. Here it is .....(kind of) with Windows CE instead of Linux. Just speculation (on my part) that Microsoft was attempting to be the first to claim the $100 netbook...they almost made it.

I'm certain some kind of Linux distro could be run on this, maybe not Xubuntu but maybe Fluxbox. Dillo is a pretty fast browser, though I don't think it is the most secure. I wonder what the cost of the Windows CE license was to the manufacturer.

[Claudio]

We kept hearing rumors that after the "One laptop per child" computer was released that there will be a true $100 netbook/laptop due to be released at some point. Here it is .....(kind of) with Windows CE instead of Linux. Just speculation (on my part) that Microsoft was attempting to be the first to claim the $100 netbook...they almost made it.

I'm certain some kind of Linux distro could be run on this, maybe not Xubuntu but maybe Fluxbox. Dillo is a pretty fast browser, though I don't think it is the most secure. I wonder what the cost of the Windows CE license was to the manufacturer.

Slackware has an ARM port, as do Ubuntu and Debian. Considering the ARM-based "smartbooks" that will start appearing soon (I hope), most distributions are doing what they can to have an ARM port available.