Someone should take stuff like this and make a Really Compact Netbook/Tablet OS. Such a device could undercut competitors by requiring 1/50th the resources. An instant-on grayscale tablet "Moleskine" that just worked and had a gorgeous trans-reflective screen would rule. (Haiku OS might be a better starting point.)
Lately I have been showing a lot of younger kids how to program in scheme. This means I have been setting up a lot of older laptops with linux + dr scheme as that is the ideal environment for books like the little schemer, how to design programs etc. I have to say that it feels like there should be a MUCH lighter way to accomplish this. I understand dr scheme can do a lot of cool graphical stuff too but I would LOVE it if there was a linux distro that had nothing except for a lisp/scheme interpreter like this + ncurses dr scheme type interface. This way it would run on next to nothing hardware and not run into so many strange hic-ups w/ x on spurious hardware.
A moleskine tablet like you mention with an external rollout keyboard would be so ideal. I'm not asking for a lisp-all-the-way-down (well I would like that too) OS but it would be rad if someone rolled a x-less version of ubuntu or what not w/ the exclusive purpose of teaching/learning scheme.
Arch Linux is a nicely stripped down linux distro. Provided you could find or write a nice ncurses interface for scheme, you could probably build such a system on top of Arch.
I use Arch and Musca (a relatively new, very minimal tiling window manager) on an eee pc 1000 HE and it works extremely well.
A while ago there was some discussion about some custom OS designs, I remember one with a relatively modern looking gui that fitted on a 1.44MB disk - http://www.menuetos.net/
Wonder if that could be fitted with a scheme version to get something near what you want - but being a custom OS, not sure how that will affect things.
