Some happy news for the New Year!

[Craig Morehouse]

Hello and best wishes to everyone.

I am Craig Morehouse, General Manager of Big Tiger Imports LLC.

I have found a special line of Netbooks made in China, and I am building 
the business foundation to sell them in the USA. Unlike most Netbooks, 
these will be full featured notebook computers with 4GB RAM and 500GB 
hard drives.

Fortunately, the Chinese offer many of their product lines with a choice 
of Windows 7 or Linux. So, I knew the machines would be Linux 
compatible. I figured that the combination of Atom processors and 
Lubuntu software might work nicely.

I ordered the first sample several weeks ago and put Lubuntu on it. As 
predicted, the results are wonderful. It was almost emotional.

I first contributed to the Free and Open Source Software movement in 
1985. A small part of Emacs is mine ( a very small part, but I am quite 
proud of having contributed). Since then I did a couple of other 
projects at the Free Software Foundation's request. Basically language 
development and grunt work. I've been using Linux as my primary home 
system since the late 90's. I'm a Certified Apple Technician as well.

I also worked with Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg for a decade. Many 
of you have never heard of the Dynabook, but you might google it. It's a 
part of computing history. This is my tribute to Alan Kay and the late 
Dr. Michael Hart. I have shared these visions for a long, long time (did 
I mention that I am old? Eh, what's that?). The hardware part is a 
reality; the other phase of the DynaBook and PG were their  educational 
purposes. I intend to complete the visions.

Anyway, the upshot of the situation is that I'm going to sell these 
NetBooks for less than $300. They will come with Lubuntu and the Project 
Gutenberg DVD books.

I am working now to convert all Gutenberg 29,000 books in the collection 
from text format to .epub format. I'm using the Calibre program for the 
library and conversion. The Ebook reader that comes with Lubuntu is 
splendid.

So, the little notebooks will be available in five colors, (Black, White 
Pink, Red and Yellow). Each machine will come with Lubuntu, the LXDE 
environment customized to younger folks and the adults who will be 
teaching them. I'm going through all the Educational software available 
for all Ubuntu flavors, and will have a wide selection organized and 
available right out of the box. We'll also have more than 29,000 Ebooks 
from Project Gutenberg on each machine.

I'm too old now to be an active developer any longer, but I have 30 
years experience with Graphic User Interfaces along with computer game 
design. Basically, I've seen most every GUI used in the USA and the UK 
to any extent, and I know from the inside what such projects require.

I'll be giving $2 to the Lubuntu developers and $2 to Project Gutenberg 
for each notebook sold.

I'd like to  give feedback to the lubuntu-users list since I will be 
watching exactly how people interact with the machines.

It will take about 6 - 8 weeks to get everything ready. There's a 
lead-time to get the machines, there's a lot of work needed to do the 
ebook conversions, and we have to work around the Chinese New Year 
vacation times.

So I'd like to be an ally here as much as I can.

Thanks to all of you,
Craig Morehouse