Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth says next week the company will be announcing a custom version of its popular Ubuntu Linux distribution for low-cost ultraportable, also known as Netbooks. All we know at this point is that it will be known as the Netbook Remix and it will be optimized for computers like the Eee PC, MSI Wind, and HP Mini-Note.

Shuttleworth dropped this tantalizing bit of info during an interview with The Guardian. No word on what the Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu will look like, or how it will be optimized for tiny laptops. At the very least, I imagine it will handle low resolution displays like the Eee PC 701's 800 x 480 pixel resolution right out of the box with little to no tweaking. I'm also hoping it will include some performance optimizations for slower processors, but Ubuntu already performs fairly well on older machines.

In fact, people have been running Ubuntu on Netbooks pretty much since day one. If you have a little Linux know-how, it's not that hard to customize the operating system for various devices including the Eee PC and HP Mini-Note. Or for the less technically inclined, you can try EeeXubuntu or MinBuntu, user-created distributions that make it as easy as possible to set up Ubuntu on these laptops.

Shuttleworth does say that Canonical is working with Intel on the Netbook Remix. It's not clear what that means for those of us who might want to run Remix on low-cost ultraportables with VIA processors like the HP Mini-Note of the Everex Cloudbook.

[via Slashdot]