A quick note on Ubuntu for netbooks

Few details are available yet, but Mark Shuttleworth revealed in an interview with the Guardian that a version of Ubuntu customized for the netbook market would be released in early June. Unfortunately, details are scarce; here's the line from the interview:

[The Guardian]: Will you be coming out with a tailored version of Ubuntu for the ultraportable sector?

[Mark Shuttleworth]: We're announcing it in the first week of June. It's called the Netbook Remix. We're working with Intel, which produces chips custom-made for this sector.

I'm afraid that's it. A search of the launchpad site for this effort doesn't yield much either. I guess we'll be waiting until June, but here's hoping for optimizations related to the small screens and Atom processors we can expect to see in this market.

One other side note: Tectonic reported yesterday on Microsoft director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow's statements during an April outreach trip to South Africa. Mr. Matusow, though not completely off-base in his assessment of the potential for significant costs associated with open source software development and support, put his foot in his mouth when he noted that

“Deep dev of the core OS” was not likely to happen in South Africa where students were “still grappling with coding skills”, says Matusow. They are “not going to dive into the inner workings of Linux”

Where was it that Mark Shuttleworth was from again? Oh, that's right, South Africa. There's this other silly little OS called OS X. It's loosely based on FreeBSD (a pretty slick OS in its own right), also developed by a South African named Theo de Raadt. Oops.