There appears to be no stopping the success Asus is having with its Eee PC subnotebooks. The company is forecasting this week that it will nearly double shipments of the svelte, low-cost machines in the second quarter. Shipments will rise to between 1.2 million to 1.3 million units, the company says, and it expects to move a whopping 5 million units this year. To put that in perspective, Asus shipped 350,000 units in the fourth quarter. Originally all Linux-based, the company will deliver a Windows-based Eee PC in early May. Can we expect the Linux versions to stick around?

In case you've lost track of which versions of the Eee PC are now offered, there are the Eee PC 4G (a Linux version with 4GB of storage, seen at left), the EeePC 8G (an 8GB version also running Linux), and the upcoming Eee PC 900 (a Windows or Linux version with either 12GB or 20GB of storage). All the systems now run Intel mobile chips instead of the VIA chips they originally had--an improvement. They all also have 802.11g Wi-Fi on board.

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