Asus will bring the Eee Box desktop to the UK in August, the company announced today. However, it confirmed to Register Hardware that machine will initially only ship with Windows XP Home Edition.

DeviceVM announced that its quick-booting Splashtop Linux implementation is being pre-installed in ROM (read-only memory) on four new Asus motherboards. Asus says it plans to ship over a million Splashtop-ready motherboards per month, making this one of the largest Linux deployments ever.

A YEAR ago, ASUS told the press that it was "closely tied up with Microsoft.” This happened just months after ASUS had expressed its future commitment to the GNU/Linux platform and recently we learned that Microsoft probably offered kickbacks to ASUS. It is almost confirmed now. The effect on ASUS appears to be devastating as liaising with Microsoft did not really pay off.

Netbooks are all the rage at the moment, with Asus predicting that it will sell 5 million of its Asus Eee PC netbooks by the end of this year. However, one of the tricky aspects of netbooks is that they have much more limited hardware resources than larger, traditional notebooks. For that reason, it makes sense to put applications on your machine that are both lightweight and powerful.

In what I think is the biggest victory for Linux so far, DeviceVM’s Splashtop Linux desktop will ship across the entire P5Q range of motherboards, with more to follow by the end of the year.

Netbook pioneer Asus will introduce a new version of its Eee PC (left) next year for just $200, says company president Jerry Shen. The company has also teamed up with Intel to launch a new website, intended to bring about the "world's first community-designed PCs."

Acer, the world’s third largest computer seller, said today that it will offer a new, low-cost laptop targeted primarily at emerging markets. Little is known about the model aside from the fact that will have a 7- or 9-inch display, cost about $470, and ship sometime in the second or third quarter. The specs and price would put it in direct competition with other low-cost models such as the Asus Eee PC and the Everex CloudBook, and to a lesser extent OLPC’s XO laptop.

Linux stacks such as Moblin and Maemo will dominate the mobile Internet device (MID) market, says a report by ABI Research. The firm expects Moblin to take 42 percent of the market in 2013, when it expects 86 million Linux-enabled MIDs to ship.

First through the Eee PC and now through its PC motherboards, Asus is rapidly carving a global reputation for itself as the company which knows how to take Linux mainstream. The question is will including the minimalist cut-down version of Linux called Splashtop on a million motherboards a month finally bring on the Linux desktop age or has it made the desktop redundant?