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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.
Kudos to the author of this article, as it was genuinely interesting and informative.
These machines are obviously an affordable, functional, and useful personal computing package for the 'alternative' (or perhaps just plain thrifty) user. Perhaps Red Hat or another distribution vendor should strike up a deal with Wal-Mart to bundle copies of Linux with the machines? It's been done before with not a huge amount of success, but Wal-Mart is a pretty powerful distribution mechanism, and the product already exists minus one inexpensive and 'easy-to-include' component.
How long do you think it will take for other hardware vendors to follow a similiar path? Is there enough demand for it? Does Microsoft offer too great an incentive (target market, for example) for vendors to switch away from their platform?
At Wal-Marts website at the bottom of the page that features the Windows-less machines is the following note with respective links:
See all computers without operating systems. Also, check out our selection of Linux books.
Yes folks, they are PROMOTING Linux for these machines. So it might be possible that they could bundle a distro with the pc in the future.