Everex’s CloudBook has finally showed up on Wal-Mart.com. Not sure how the unit is already out of stock and how you can still manage to buy a 2-Year service plan. Any ideas?

We confirmed with Paul Kim of Everex yesterday that there is no real delay of units coming stateside:

The next round should arrive in the states the end of this month and be available for sale by the first week of March. The Digitimes article refers to the Taiwanese version of the CloudBook which really was delayed from the blizzard.

We also confirmed that our unboxed system is the same system that has been shipped to the early-adopters, who have ordered the CloudBook.

Unfortunately, it looks like the first few thousand units of the CloudBook were released with the windows sizing issue. We’re having the proper documentation made for those units so users will understand how to properly navigate through those screens. Additionally, we’re testing an auto update feature but don’t have confirmation on the release date yet.

A few early adopters (like Meredith Farkas and JamFish) have already gotten their CloudBooks. While they seem to have some of the same screen size issues we have, they ultimately like the machine.

Paul Kim added that the second shipment of the CloudBook might have some tweaks on the software side, but the hardware will remain the same.

He also shot down online rumors of a major kernel problem with gOS and the VIA chipset used in the CloudBook.

On online forum Gmane, UK user Andrew Smith started a thread called PROBLEM: Corruption problems in pata_via for Via NanoBook owners (Cloudbook, EasyNote XS etc.) In the thread, Smith writes:

Changes in 2.24 have rendered the ide handling on the Via NanoBook unstable resulting in data loss under heavy load.

The claim was that the Linux kernel installed on the CloudBook and its UK cousin, the EasyNote XS, was incompatible with the hard drive controller. However, Paul Kim told us:

The gOS / VIA chipset issue involves 2.6.24 kernels. Note that the CloudBook uses a 2.6.22 kernel that does not have the aforementioned IDE and root bugs.