Hi,
A collegue of mine on the ILUG Bom list alerted me to this thread. I am working with eSys in Singapore, and am "responsible" for the OS you see.
The ePC range was launched in Oct 2002, and has undergone changes in positioning. At that time, as Prakash said, we were working with Via in producing a low-cost PC. That was the product brief my team had, and that is what we delivered. The idea was to reduce cost, reduce cost, reduce cost.
As prices for components fell, and as we increased our volumes, it became easier to stay under the 10k barrier, but also provide some performance. The machines you see advertised are our "3rd generation", and feature more RAM and faster CPUs. We have convinced Intel that India has volume, and they have supported us with lower pricing.
All hardware is Linux compatible, and we bundle a Debian-based internally-developed OS. It is Debian-based, so you can modify sources.list, apt-get, and overwrite our Logo ;-) It is Linux-based, so you can pop in a Mandrake, or PCQ9.0, and know that it will work. For those who are on the wrong list, yes, we also supply Windows drivers.
Where can you buy this from? Your first contact should be Sunil Gera: +91 22 33915154. I do not think we are doing direct sales in India (we sell the ePC over the net in Austria, UK, and US; see
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X3...
where we bundle Mandrake). You may need to contact a Dealer for the actual delivery.
Please ask me any other technical questions, for discounts, ask Sunil.
Regards,
-- Sanjeev