Project Sputnik's laptops to be available this fall (2012)

Born out of the "curiosity" to explore the possibility of building an open-source laptop designed with developers in mind, Project Sputnik aims at combining the power of Ubuntu 12.04 with Dell's XPS13 laptop.

Weeks ago, the project was made public and, "since the beta announcement we have received thousands of applications from around the world", it is clear now that Sputnik is about to shift from a pilot to a actual product stage.

Project Sputnik's available features are drivers/patches (for hardware enablement) and basic offering of key tools and utilities, but, "coming soon", the developer-specific laptops are to gain profile tool (software management tool, useful to "pull down various developer profiles e.g. javascript, ruby, android") and cloud tool (support o create micro-clouds on the laptop).

Shaped by the serious efforts of Dell and "Canonical has been “scrappin” right besides us, helping to drive the project and doing a ton of engineering on the software side", the Project Sputnik is to be available in the next months, "this fall we will be offering an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS-based laptop pre-loaded on Dell’s XPS13 laptop".