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Installing Linux On A Wal-Mart OS-less machine
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.
did walmart use a modem designed for windows on a machine that did not have windows pre-installed?
Sure, that particular modem can be supported under linux (and other operating systems?), but the clear point of these machines was that they did not have windows pre-loaded
so why use components that are designed for windows and often wont work with other operating systems?
How many people, who buy computers at Walmart, are willing to installing Linux/read these instructions.
If you are so worried about the MSFT tax don't buy prebuilt computers, duh.
That's like worrying about paying a "ford" tax and going to your ford dealer.
Not at all - this is a "Microsoft Tax" - the computer is not made by Microsoft. If when you bought your Ford you had to take out insurance from a particular insurance company (whether or not you already had insurance), then that would be a better comparison, and people would complain.
You ought to be able to buy a computer without a software vendor insisting you buy their product as well.
> As long as you have experience putting linux on a PC
the author picked "newbie" options every time, and everything worked straight away (bar the modem). So it would be fair to say "You don't need experience of putting Linux on a PC"
>as long as you don't need a modem; it's a winmodem
If you look at the comments further down, several people got the modem to work (albiet having to recomile their kernels). So it *is* possible to get the modem to work under Linux. Admittedly, maybe beyong a beginner.
I've got an Intel Celery 1100 board with everything integrated. The only thing I did was to disable the onboard video controller and add an Nvidia MX 400 card. It's hardly a crappy board. A better word for it would be inexpensive, and reliable. Probably the same applies to the Microstar board. Not everyone is interested in overclocking and tinkering with chip voltages.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I was very glad to hear that most distros installed on the machine with no trouble I was thinking about getting one these things myself.
_ __
I hear some people painting the winmodem experience as typical but I have used the ltmodem packages on four different machines with great results. Below in some of the comments it is explaining that this particular one is a chipset that is not really supported. Still, the ltmodem modules work great for the winmodem in my Dell 4000 right now.
What I like is that he did not just install one distro and let it go at that. He installed multiple distros which gives a reviewer a much nicer base of experience to speak from.
Read carefully his experiences with the install. It just goes to show linux installs are getting much easier and autodetection is very good.
There are still gotchas (his was the modem) but anyone not using Windows pre-loaded from the manufacturer to work with that machine will come up with at least one install gotcha. My gotcha was the free Umax scanner that came with my laptop. Xsane still has no driver for it because of Umax's bull-headedness. The funny thing is that Dell started selling the Epson 1250 after that and I hear they work great with Linux. Argh!
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ACK
I see Wal-Marts everywhere
That is probably because Walmart, number one on the fortune 500 with $220 Billion (with a B) in annual revenue (compared to Microsoft which is 72nd with $25 Billion), has sucessfully used predatory pricing to drive out of business all of the small mom-n-pop businesses and most of their larger competitors.
Before we all jump on the WalMart bandwagon just because we think they are taking a swipe at Microsoft, we must remember that this is the company that used its power to force record labels to produce two copies of every album (one nice for Walmart and one naughty for everyone else).
The average user won't buy this.
not everyone has the time or the inclination to go out and find, buy, and assemble all of the parts into one machine. Some people might just not be into the hardware scene enough to want to do that. I'd buy I clone because I'd just have more fun fixing it when it sucks and breaks. The problem here is that for a long time you could only buy a computer *with* an operating system, and the only OS the store would give you to choose was Windows. It sounds like something called coercive tied selling to me (salesperson implying that you must buy one product in order to buy the other). Maybe before building your own was the best way to avoid that problem. Maybe people are just saying that they're glad it's not like that now, and they can just go out and buy a computer like anyone else would.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp? customer_id=04&keycode=6W300&order_code=dim44pri
599 with 100$ rebate.. Pentium IV 1.7ghz. Call their small business line and tell them you need it sans OS because you want linux on it. Boom. Your price is now $399 for a Pentium IV 1.7
All he tested was a Duron at 1GHz. I would like to see the results from doing the same tests with the higher end models. The way he made it sound, you could get a much better PC for about $600 and most of the components would probably be PCI and not wired to the motherboard. When you get the lowest of low end, like a Duron, it frequently comes with one of those do-it-all motherboards that has substandard (in my opinion) components, such as the modem and ethernet interface.
It was a thorough review of the low end machine, I admit, but I'd really like to see how the higher end machines performed. $880, or whatever he said the max price was, isn't that much for a 2Ghz machine with 512MB ram, and I think that would still be a "price concious" buy for a linux user.
~ now you know
How much would it cost W'mart to sell these machines with a pre-loaded Linux image? Surely if they cut a gold image it would only cost a few cents to ghost them onto the hard drives before they went into the machines? Or they could produce a "recovery CD", which restores a Linux image which works on that hardware?
How much better for the customer to go home with a system which they can plug in and start playing nethack straight away without having to obtain and install a Linux distro.
And it would annoy the crap out of M$.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Look, you are viewing this backward I think. Maybe I'm the one viewing it backward. The point is this, however.
Wal-Mart does not care about the people who are usually shopping at Wal-Mart when they are selling them these computers. This, in my humble opinion, was never about the typical Wal-Mart shopper.
Someone in Wal-Mart management was only just savvy enough to recognize that there was a computer community in full force that did not want to have Windows on their computer. It goes back to the basics of supply and demand.
There is a community of people demanding that computers be available without Microsoft anything.
There is now a supplier of computers without Microsoft anything.
Now, with news sites like Slashdot running stories on it. More people are going to be saying to themselves. "I could hit walmart.com, pick up a new clone and drop linux on it." Some of them might even be saying "I could drop my existing copy of Windows on it."
Even if the machine isn't a major name brand, Wal-Mart has more people than ever looking their way now because of this. With the whole Microsoft trial, and the all the anti-Microsoft sentiment right now, this is probably just the thing for Wal-Mart to do.
Even if they can't pull in the "build it yourself" crowd. Joe Sixpack has heard from all his buddies who are in the crowd how bad the "Microsoft Tax" really is. Even if they end up installing Windows anyway, these machines still get a quick look.
The only thing I can say is that it appears to be a win/win situation for Wal-Mart.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
That is perhaps true. However, there are also people whose cheap computers have just died, and they need a new one, and they already have a "legal" copy of Windows that was installed on the dead computer (assuming that it's not an OEM version tied to the original hardware). That's a completely legitimate use that not even MS can really argue with.
And then you have people who are buying a second computer (for the kids perhaps) and are going to install one copy of Windows on both of them. Microsoft might call that piracy, but most reasonable people wouldn't.
With that in mind, the number of people who are actually pirating Windows --- in the sense of actually going and downloading XP from Morpheus or some such just to avoid paying for it --- to put on a new computer is probably not quite so large as you theorize. It's probably still mostly going to get Microsoft POed, though, because they're going to perceive it as encouraging piracy.
Microsoft might be the 2,000 pound gorilla ... but Wal-Mart is a pretty big ape itself. They could stand up to MS if they really want to.
Please write to them in friendly, non-condesending words how helpful it is to offer non-winmodem PC's, of make modem an option. Being a jerk is unlikely to have your letter read past the "Dear Bloated Sack of Protoplasm" salutation. It's a big step for Wal-Mart, love 'em or hate 'em, and if it's a success than others will likely follow suit. If Wal-Mart sees it as a failure and the type of customer they've attracted as obnoxious jerks, the decision to drop it and declare it a bad business decision will be that much easier.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Because Wal-Mart is not selling these to push Linux. They are selling these because some people who already own computers (and have install CDs for Windows of some variety) would like to save a few bucks on newer hardware without having to rebuy their OS. That much is obvious from their choice of modems.
I do not have a signature
[i]If I had wanted to keep Windows on the machine, I would have had to manually install drivers for both the ethernet and sound card, because Windows did neither on installation.[/i]
Yeah, recompiling the kernel is SO much easier than checking "Use a driver from specified location"
Based on Wal-Mart's love of Chinese factories to mass produce all that plastic crap they sell, they should be bundling *Red Flag Linux* with these boxes.
It's funny/sad/lame to me that eveyone here hates MS for being predatory and abusing their monopoly power, but nobody is taking Wal-Mart to task. Remember, Wal-Mart got to be Wal-Mart by rolling their mega-stores into town and putting Mom and Pop out of business. They are hostile to their wage-slave workers' attempts to unioninze. Many of their products are made in sweatshop factories in China. (Consider that your queue, Libertarians.)
If you think that Wal-Mart gives a shit about the intellectual agenda behind Linux then you are either ignorant or stupid.
Wal-Mart just might be the force big enough to combat MS on the "MS Tax" OEM issue (since Dell etc. have all rolled over), but that does NOT mean that they are Pro-Linux. It means they can get the box put together cheaply in China and appear to sell it for less. I bet they eke out a higher margin selling Win XP Retail Box version to those who forgot they need an OS than if they preinstalled the OEM version from MS.
Wal-Mart: Watch for falling ethics!
I don't believe machines sold to the unwashed masses should be pre-loaded with Linux yet. I say this because I remember what happened the first time the Unwashed Masses were exposed to Linux. The 1997-1998 Linux hype (circa RH5.0) has hurt Linux more than you'd believe from what I've observed.
I've seen screwdriver shops load Red Hat 5.x and later on 6.0 (the one that came with GNOME 1.0), as did corporate/gov entities at the time, only to see them recoil in horror and run back to Win9x/NT.
The "Microsoft killer"/"it can do everything you want" hype of the time came too early. There were no integrated environments (RH5.0 came out before KDE 1.0, remember) and even when KDE/GNOME 1 appeared, they were too immature/feature incomplete to be truly useful. GNOME 1.0 even had some serious stability problems IIRC. They were just a sign of greater things to come.
Now, KDE is halfway done dealing with the two last major shortcomings of End-User *nix: printing and font management. (Can't talk about GNOME, since I do not use it.) Once the current transitory period will be over at the XFree86 layer (the move from Xft-1 to Xft-2 and the propagation of the FontConfig library) and that Qt/KDE will have taken advantage of it (ditto GTK2+GNOME2.x), *then* it will be the time to do a push in the non-geek market. But not before.
Right now, geeks can deal with whatever functional shortcomings (or "complications", if you want) that currently exist in Linux/FreeBSD/etc. I know about Xft, my XF86Config-4 file, CUPS and whatnot, but Joe Schmoe User doesn't. He only wants his machine to work. He wants for his printouts to look ok, for the fonts on said printout to more or less match in size & proportions what is on the screen. He does not want to type in a document in OpenOffice/KOffice/whatever (is WordPerfect still selling/working on a Linux version of its OA suite?), get it nice looking on the screen, only to discover that the layout is totally screwed up on the printout.
With a lot of work (too much work?), I am myself getting there, because I'm somewhat of a geek. But I doubt your average non-geek end-user could get good-looking fonts & printouts working on his box. And that's why I strongly believe it would not be a good thing to have Linux pre-loaded on these WalMart machines just yet. We do not want to give a bad initial impression to all those potential users out there.
When Xft-2 and FontConfig come out with XFree 4.3 (I hope), that Qt & GTK are modifed to use this new universal font management functionality, and that KDE & GNOME are consequently modified, *then* I believe would be a good time to start negotiating pre-loading agreements with WalMart and other mass merchandizers (sp?). Mostly because the Unwashed Masses would be less likely to get a bitter after-taste (ok, nasty surprises) than they are right now.
The point is that you cannot approach all those typical non tech-oriented Wal-Mart buyers with the current generation of OSS (KDE/GNOME, XFree, CUPS, etc.) because the chances are too great that the resulting "out-of-the-box" experience will be very negative for them. Once we can virtually guarantee that they won't be badly surprized, once we can provide them with all the functionality they expect to find in a modern-day OS, then we can approach them. Not before.
I think it is just a question of *months*, not years until the OSS universe is ready. We just have to avoid going in too early. Just wait a bit, that's all.
Boy, some of you /.ers are pretty heartless.
Have YOU ever started a business or have you just been a cog in someone elses' machine all your life?
I guess what i'm getting at is...
WAL-MART IS THE MICROSOFT OF RETAIL.
The "Good Ol' Boy" network crushes the little man time and time again.
No, i am not a "hippy", nor a "bleeding heart liberal", so save your shitty generalizations.
Competition is HEALTHY for our economy.
(not shareholders, but they're rich enough already)
Keyword that should have been included in this article is WINMODEM. Drivers have not been distributed with the latest distros of linux, but there is a .org of developers that have Linmodem drivers under construction. Presently beta versions though. Good article though. Walmart should have sold the HW with full HW modems but that would have tacked on another $50.
Jaxs