Mandrake to Come Preloaded on Wal-Mart PCs

surfimp writes "Here's a story from NewsForge: 'MandrakeSoft CEO Jacques Le Marois confirms the news this morning, and company spokeswoman Margaret Waters says, while a contract with Microtel has not been finalized, the company is working on getting Mandrake certified to run like clockwork on the Microtel systems. Waters is hopeful that the dotted line will be signed and PCs up for sale by the end of next week.'" Update: 06/20 17:21 GMT by T : Ooops! The Mandrake spokeswoman's name is Margaret Waples, not Waters. Apologies, and thanks to Todd Lyons of Mandrakesoft for the correction.

Comments

Is it really support for linux?

[Twid]

The pessimist position here is that Wal-Mart knows full well that 99% of consumers will immediately get their smart uncle Bob to come over, reformat the hard drive, and install a version of Windows. So, the installation of Mandrake is just a ploy to make their PC's cheaper than their competition and get sales.

I'm not saying that Mandrake isn't good, or that Linux isn't fun to run. I'm just saying that the average consumer is going to be upset when they find that they can't run Microsoft Word or Quicken.

- Twid