Before the netbook-boom called 'mini notebook', Lemote now promotes it as netbook (what it really is). The specialty of that little thing is the hardware: Not an Intel Atom or some AMD CPU, but a 900Mhz Mips chip. Honestly, after my disaster with something ARM-based (NSLU2, it still is bricked and will never be revived I think), I wanted something more end-user friendly and the Lemote is just that. Equipped with a full-fledged desktop installation (the Debian mipsel variant) it allows installing Gentoo with few problems. Chrooting and installing the stage tarball from Zhang Le gets you off quite fast. The provided kernel did not boot, but Le gave me a newer one, which worked just fine after creating some missing device files (console, tty* and pty*, see man mknod). Meanwhile I have compiled my own kernel and the system just runs with LXDE...so finally a possibility to have the third Gtk-based destop installed. Gnome on sol (the big iron desktop), Xfce on the main lappy (called terra) and LXDE now on mars. Performance is good, for surfing and mailing it is more than sufficient, compile times are ok (even GNU Emacs runs), but the battery is way too small (1.5 hours only, but a peak of 14W consumption, while having 12W during normal surf sessions).
The Loongson processor seems to me as the future of the Gentoo Mips port. Supporting the old SGI machines is nice but they will eventually die out, while Lemote actively works on new machines and supports Linux as its main platform (they don't have any other choice apart from the BSDs anyway). Ordering is really simple: Either use Lemote directly (and handle all customs yourself), use KD85 (what I did, really pleasing experience, shipped from Belgium) or Tekmote from the Netherlands.
Zhang Le (r0bertz) and Stuart Longland (redhatter) wrote enough about the Loongson processor and the Gentoo support in various entries on their blogs, so I won't go into more details.
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Kommentare
In *addition* every software is free, from the bios to the firmwares.
For a hacker standpoint this is the _best_ computer available.
Everything else onboard is generation or two behind todays standard and LCD is average at best.
Chinese stuff is maybe not such cr*p as it used to be, but neither is its price.
As it was pointed out already, the battery life is very poor, so it fits not all use cases. But if you don't depend on long battery life, the fact that the Yeelong is fully hackable makes up for that.
I've even hooked the netbook up to my Kenwood TS-120S HF transceiver and used it as a PSK31 terminal on 20m during the International Lighthouse Lightship weekend, calling CQ as "VK4MM/LT"... apparently putting out a very clear and readable signal which was picked up by a few US amateur operators.
Video editing is also possible... to a limited extent. I found processing individual frames using netpbm isn't much slower on the Yeeloong, compared to an AMD Turion X2 laptop I was also using. The AMD was faster, but only marginally.
Battery life... the machines are equipped with a 23Wh battery pack (3-cell Lithium Ion). I find I get about 1.5 hours, which if you take into account the 14W power drain, 1.5 hours is about right. This is while flogging the hell out of it... "emerge -j --load-average 1.0 kde-meta". I got much of KDE 4.3.0 installed whilst in transit between home (Brisbane) and work (Laidley) on the train.
An Asus EEE might score a far longer battery life, but I think many of them have a much larger battery pack, and are significantly heavier than the Yeeloong (which is light as a feather)... if we are going to compare them, we should be comparing apples to apples here, and try to compare the Yeeloong with a machine that has an equivalent size battery pack.
Regarding battery life, the EeePC wikipedia page describes one of the EeePC models as getting 10.5 hrs use from a 63Wh battery, suggesting an average use of 6W, compared to the "12W on [an] unused desktop" for the Yeeloong. The EeePC model in question has a slightly larger screen, though I'm not sure if it has a spinning hard disk or not.
(Of course, working well with Free Software will for many people be much more important than a few W power consumption or marginally different CPU speed.)