The Aleutia is a small desktop PC that is powered by a roll-up solar panel and uses just 8W. It comes with Puppy Linux, a small Linux distributions that is designed for older hardware. Due to the limited resources (128MB RAM, 200Mhz processor, and just 1GB of storage on a CF card), Puppy Linux, DSL, and Windows 95 are just about the only options for it. The Aleutia costs 499 GBP or about 1000 USD.

The problem with the Aleutia has nothing to do with the product itself. It has to do with the product’s competition. If you compare the Asus Eee PC and the Aleutia PC you get this:

• Eee PC is 2.5x less expensive. ($400 to $1000)
• Eee PC has better specs.
• Eee PC is more portable.

The one thing that the Aleutia has over the Eee PC is that it provides a solar panel. Given the price difference (Eee is $600 less), I decided to check the price of third-party solar panels. The first place I found was selling fold up solar panels. A 26-watt solar panel costs just over $300, and provides sufficient power to run the Eee PC at full load and charge its battery at the same time. If you do the math, the Eee PC with a solar panel comes out $300 cheaper, and the Eee PC has a number of advantages over the Aleutia as noted above.

Make Tech Easier recently wrote a guide on setting up a program called SBackup to automatically backup all of your important files to another place. There is no major news with SBackup, but it made me realize the importance of Linux distributions including an easy-to-use GUI application to make backups easy. For technical users, installing the backup solution of their choice is simple and they can choose from terminal tools like rsync or from GUI tools like SBackup, but for less technical users, the kind who are starting to use Linux more and more, who don’t know that they need to go find a backup program, they will only backup if there are graphical tools they can use out of the box to automatically set up their backups.

With Leopard advertising Time Machine and more and more people talking about backups, consumers are starting to realize that their data is not safe. Unless every operating system, Linux and others, makes it easy for them to press a button once and have backups all the time, backups will remain something for the geeks.