At Lenovo's launch of its x300 in Paris, we raised the topic of Linux. It seems the Chinese laptop-maker won't be jumping quickly in that direction.

We also had a good lok at a machine which, we have to say, looks very covetable.

The x300 is a thin laptop - but Lenovo rejects the idea that it's competing with the much-hyped MacBook air. That's clear enough, as it's better than the Air. It has a bay for a DVD burner (or you can use the bay for an extra battery which take it to a claimed 10 hours life) and it also has Ethernet, and three USB ports.



Lenovo spokespeople went into a bit of detail about the physics of thin laptops. Perhaps unexpectedly, a lighter laptop actually needs a strontger case than a heavy one. Because it's lighter, users can hold it by one hand. When you do this, the laptop is supported by one side or one corner only, and this produces a greater bending stress on the laptop - and potentially on the motherboard.

So a lightweight laptop needs to be stronger. The phsyical size means that it will have corners cut - but the only obvious one is in the processor, which only runs to 1.2GHz.

This sparked a suggestion that maybe we'd be better off running Linux on the x300, instead of Vista, to make better use of the processor cycles. Lenovo's David McQuarrie acknowledged the logic, but said that Linux wasn't a big draw for the high-end corporate road warriors who use Thinkpads.

I could see Lenovo making a Linux-based machine in its Idea range, but we're probably a little way off from that. Lenovo has a lightweight laptop there but it's still a relatively high-end machine. I wouldn't expect a Linux machine until Lenovo has grown its consumer business (currently around 20 percent of the company's laptops) a bit.