By Erica Sadun
January 08, 2009 - 03:47PM CT

Yesterday, while looking through the Comdex news feeds, I stumbled across a Mini Mi 1000 HP product announcement from HP. The Mini Mi retails from just $329.99 and ships with Mobile Internet, a "user-friendly, all-inclusive interface built on Linux".

What caught my eye on the product page wasn't the description of the GUI, it was what followed on the next line. Preceded by "Please note" in bold, the HP page states "the Linux command line interface is disabled on this edition." I contacted HP to ask why it had disabled the Linux command line interface. HP offered the following statement from Jonathan Kaye, the Director of Consumer Notebooks at HP:

The HP Mini 1000 with Mi is designed for the consumer who wants to do the main activities with their computer such as email, browsing the Internet, and chatting without worrying about operating systems or what is inside. HP is focused on the user experience and developed the HP Mini 1000 with Mi for the mass consumer market that wants a complete mobile Internet experience and not just a Linux computer. As this is HP’s first product with a custom user interface built on Linux, HP is very open to customer feedback that could help improve the experience.

I write from a very particular viewpoint: I am, at least as far as Linux is concerned, almost exclusively a command-line user. For me, the notion that there could be a Linux distribution without command-line access sounded strangely like Heresy. And yet, could there be a greater vote of confidence in the consumer power of Linux distributions than HP's decision to move forward with this version of Mobile Internet?