No problem: "half life" is just the period of time that an atom has a 0.5 probability of surviving.
I believe that the GP was referring to the fact that the word "atom" means "undividable". But that's just my guess, of course...
But let's start spreading those conspiracy theories anyway!
Yes, let's. Business has been slow lately.
If you buy a netbook and the OEM Linux distro, customized by the manufacturer, doesn't run the hardware properly, please let us know.
Okay. I bought a HP2133 (model FU337EA#AK8) as a Christmas present for my sister. It came with Novell SLED 10. The out-of-the-box-installation was completely unusable. Besides choosing a distro that's a real PITA to get forum support about (and in cases like these, it's pretty much the only support you'll get), the hardware they included had linux support ranging from poor to horrible.
Here's a list of the worst problems:
-Graphics drivers. The laptop uses a VIA graphics card, and out of the box, it only runs in an awful looking 640x480-stretched-to-fit-the-screen-VESA-mode. There are some pre-compiled 3D VIA binaries for a few kernels of some distros. There's also some source code for 2D drivers that I couldn't get to compile. (Fortunately some kind soul did get them to compile, and was kind enough to make the binaries publicly available.) Of course getting it working it wasn't that easy. You see HP offers 2 different screen sizes on this laptop, and this model naturally carried the less common one. It took me three days and several forum posts to find the obscure lines to edit in xorg.conf (And I do mean obscure, not just tweaking the resolution or modlines.) Option "PanelID" "17" in combination with a few other tweaks, I believe was the key to success.
-Audio drivers. Well, they'll work out of the box it would seem, as long as you don't want to use the headphone jacks or a microphone. HP appears to be using a not-quite-supported ADI SoundMax AD1984A soundcard. If you want to use, say Skype, you need to download the latest nightly ALSA build and compile that. Then you'll get the mic and jacks working as well. The only problem remaining is that every once in a while artsd thinks that hogging all the CPU cycles is a really good idea, and the ordinary Skype package won't work. You'll want the one labelled static-oss.
-Wireless. So far I believe the community has identified 5 different WLAN-cards used in these laptops. All from Broadcom. If you follow the instructions in the wikis really, really carefully, you'll probably have it working in an hour or two.
So to sum it up: The SLED system that came with the netbook was an unusable mess. I switched to Kubuntu that I somehow managed to get working through a lot of effort, patience, and community support. The HP netbooks look very nice, and have better keyboards that most comparable systems, but given the level of half-assedness to the default install it's hard to recommend them to anyone. (The other alternative is Vista which is much more expensive, and even harder to recommend.) It would seem that HP just assumes that people buying these things are just going to pirate XP anyway, so why bother with quality control?
Oh, and I've got an Asus EEE myself. No problems whatsoever, with that one. Didn't quite like the default install, so I installed Mandriva instead. Still no problems.
Virgin Media's website still says the firm has "no plans to introduce any usage limits", despite the nationwide rollout of bandwidth throttling at the beginning of May.
Memory fault - where am I?