Hewlett Packard (HP), the world's largest seller of computers, unveiled a mini-laptop on Tuesday that sells for $500 and is aimed at the education market.

The entry-level HP Mini-Note includes a Suse Linux operating system, a 1GB memory and a 3-cell battery, while a higher priced version has Windows Vista Business, 2GB memory and a larger 6-cell battery.

Many ideas contributed to the success of Open Source and free software. Where does it go from here? There are several other technologies and trends that will truly revolutionize this space in the future. Here are a few ideas that we feel will really pick up in the near future.Developer IDEs will become more professional 

There are a lot of distros available online thatprovide you ease of installation, usage and more importantly supportfor a variety of hardware, such as digital cameras, cards readers, USBdrives and more.

With the latest release of VirtualBox, Windows and Linux can be run together simultaneously, and you don't even need to switch between the two. Using the seamless Windows feature of VirtualBox, you can run two different operating systems simultaneously on a single PC and you can use the applications of both operating systems from the same desktop simultaneously. This has been made possible by the combined efforts of VirtualBox and SeamlessRDP that is meant for seamless Windows support for rdesktop. The rdesktop, ie, the remote desktop feature helps in creating X11 Window for each Windows application that you will run from the host machine, further the application that is running can be moved and resized.