A company is now selling what it calls the "world's cheapest laptop," which at $130, is not a bad deal if you can bear some hardware limitations.

A Newcastle-based company has launched a Linux-based laptop and support package designed to encourage technophobes online. Built by the Broadband Computer Company, the Alex laptop runs an operating system based on Ubuntu Linux and a set of applications that have been written in-house.

Forget the One Laptop Per Child project hyperbole, there seems to be another contender emerging which is deserving of the title 'cheapest Linux laptop on the planet' despite having very little in the way of publicity when compared to the OLPC machine.

One Laptop Per Child's XO (commonly referred to as the $100 laptop) is designed to change the world by bringing computing resources to children in the developing world. But the many innovations in the XO may also end up changing the world of technology.

Everybody's heard about the One Laptop Per Child concept, and the ups and downs of that project, its wavering connection to free, open-source software and the fact that it still hasn't reached the $100/unit price it set out to meet. But what if I were to tell you that another company not only is committed to offering a $99 laptop to the world but is already doing it.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an amazing project that aims to give every child in the world a laptop with a cost of just $100 a laptop and they also are windup so in countries where there is no or little electricity you can wind the OLPC up to get it working.

Developer Chris Ball has announced that the upcoming OLPC XO-1.5 laptop software release will be based on Fedora 11. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is a non-profit organisation who's mission is to provide children across the world with low cost laptops for self-education.

HiVision makes the worlds cheapest Linux laptop at $98 using a new cheaper MIPS based processor, WiFi, 1GB flash storage, it runs Linux, has 3 USB ports, Ethernet, SDHC card reader, audio in and out, voice-chat, skype, multi-tabbed Firefox browser support and Abiword for word processing.

I’m buying a new laptop in April, and I’m not exactly floored by a dizzying array of options. As if I already hadn’t come to the conclusion that I needed a new laptop, my old laptop completely locked up on me while I was writing this post today. So I’m definitely in the market. Read on.