I just got my Asus EEE 900 in the mail. It highlights an issue I've thought about bringing up to the Haiku community for a year or so now. I know this will show as my first post, but please don't let this dupe you into believing I'm not experienced or invested in the Haiku project.
So here comes my concerns:
Where is the HaikuBox specification? Why not choose a distinct hardware profile that Absolutely Runs Haiku? A month ago, I would have built it on the spot. Now, I'm pretty convinced the perfect target hardware is already constructed, cheap, and awesome. Enter the Asus eee. Not only is this market going to become highly competitive price-wise (track the prices of a used 2G 701 Surf over the next few months), it's also the perfect target market. People are already going to be trying a new, open source OS for the first time. There are plenty of reasons why GNU/Linux in the Debian form is antithetical to an easily configurable desktop OS (inheriting all of GNU/Linux's problems plus the glacial pace of Debian). Throw in the filtration of the for-profit Xandros distribution and you quickly realize all the .debs in all the repositories in all the world are not going to be up to date until at least a 1/4 year after major software improvements have become widely available. If a specialized EEE version of Haiku were available, who isn't to say that people who tire of the Xandros desktop wouldn't try Haiku out on the way to the (way way worse than both) Win XP? or even on their way to a better GNU/Linux distribution?
The most important benefit is, of course, that we as a community can begin running Haiku on real hardware with minimal fuss, and , minimal expense. It would have been my number one vote on the poll, that's for sure.
