To prevent damage from dust or water, the keyboard and expected three USB ports will be sealed, which is possible because the processor is expected to generate so little heat, Blizzard said.

Although Red Hat has said in the past that it hopes to profit when schools or governments purchasing the laptops also buy supporting server computers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux installed on them, Blizzard said the goal is to actually make the laptops work fine without them.

"We want to make these laptops manageable without managers," he said.