Linux Laptops Under $300


An ultra portable small Linux laptop, like the DELL Inspiron 910 Mini Notebook PC for example, weighs in at only 2.2 pounds. This particular Linux laptop model is powered by the 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium Atom N270 processor for speed and reliability. This small Linux laptop comes with 1GB of DDR2 memory as well. Remember, this is Linux so the amount of memory is not the issue it becomes when running Windows.

Our selection of small Linux laptops under $300, using the Inspiron 910 as an example once again, have glossy 8.9” widescreen LED displays with a maximum resolution of 1024 x 600. The Inspiron 910 comes with a 16GB solid state drive usually loaded with Ubuntu Linux.

We have a wide selection of various sized Linux laptops under $300 (not just mini laptops) which have the features you are looking for such as 802.11g wireless capabilities and various multimedia functionality.

Linux Laptops Under 300 Dollars


See each description for specific features and details.


  • New Linux laptops and even older laptops running the Linux operating system provide a way to use the shell for telling the computer what to do. The shell is very much not a graphical environment yet it is a command line approach allowing the user to very quickly and efficiently communicate with the computer.


    It can be a lot of fun making cheap Linux laptops by installing this operating system on slightly older laptop computers. The default shell in Linux is the bash shell and this is actually based on the original Unix shell. The name bash actually is a compilation of the Unix Bourne shell and again shell as "Bourne again shell" becomes the word bash.


    The CPU (Central Processing Unit) uses a clock frequency which determines how fast the CPU processes instructions. Each tick of the clock represents the execution of an instruction so the faster the ticking the faster the instructions get processed. This clock frequency is measured in Megahertz (MHz) and this has been standard for a very long time on single core processors.


    The CPU is actually the brain of the computer as this is the component which actually directs and processes the instructions which are given to the system. This holds true for the applications you run including everything from checking your email to starting the operating system in the morning.


    In Linux the ps command will list the currently running processes. If you add additional arguments you can fine tune the results. For example ps –u will display all of the running processes for a particular user. Let’s say you wanted to see all of the running processes for the user root you could just type ps –u root. The ps –f command will show more of a detailed list of processes and the ps –ef will show all of the processes with the full listing format.


    The Linux operating system is constantly running many processes which can be simultaneously processed by the CPU as they will not interfere with one another. Processes use various system resources such as memory and the file system. The file system controls access to files and allocates temporary storage for the processes while the system memory holds the process and any data which happens to be running.