Apparently in all the coverage of Windows on the Eee PC, one Asus announcement was almost missed: the EP20, Asus’s entrance into the cheap Linux desktop market, according to Eeextra. Although the (very few) details about it that are known do not seem to indicate there’s much here to get excited about, one thing does make it note-worthy.

So far, despite all the companies who’ve tried, no one has created a successful inexpensive desktop computer running Linux. The same is true of the Linux UMPC market, with the exception of Asus’s incredibly successful Eee PC. So what makes the EP20 notable is simply that it is Asus’s first attempt at the inexpensive Linux desktop market.

As I said, there is no indication that the EP20 itself is anything more than another variation on the same design for a cheap Linux PC that so many others have tried. However, at the same time, I am not sure I would have been able to tell that the Eee PC was any better than the CloudBook, or any other Linux UMPC.  Of course, Asus was first into the UMPC market,  which is an advantage that it will not have in the desktop market.

The real question with the EP20 is will Asus succeed again as they did with the Eee PC, or will the EP20 go nowhere and die, as so many similar cheap Linux PCs have?

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