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Installing Linux On A Wal-Mart OS-less machine

Posted by Hemos on from the how-to dept.

Azar writes "An article at Newsforge details the experience of installing Linux on Wal-Mart's OS-less PC. It states: 'A few months ago, super-sized discount store Wal-Mart made the headlines in the Linux world by becoming the first major U.S. retailer to offer PCs without Windows preloaded...While this was widely hailed in the Open Source community as a victory over the "Microsoft tax," which usually afflicts buyers of Linux PCs, one major question remained unanswered: How well do these machines support Linux?' Here is your answer." Newsforge is owned by OSDN, which also owns Slashdot, is all part of the sinister Andover keiretsu.

2 of 390 comments (clear)

  1. Modem works? by Quixote · · Score: 5, Informative

    Some of the followups to that article mention that a working version of the modem driver can be obtained from http://www.heby.de/ltmodem.

    Given this, it would be nice if someone could put together a complete linux distro (complete with the OpenOffice suite, etc.) ready-to-run on this box. Heck, maybe we could even convince Wal-Mart to give it away with every box!

  2. Show me a driver for a type 048c Lucent modem by RC+Pavlicek · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm the author of the piece at NewsForge.

    Let's get this straight: the modem does not work.

    The people who say they have a working Lucent modem do not have this Lucent modem. This Lucent modem (type 048c) is not supported by any driver I can find. One of the people who insisted that the modem works had a type 0440, which is supported by the Lucent driver.

    If someone has a patch that makes the 048c modem work, I'll be glad to try it. But the ltmodem driver does not have it, according to the documentation.