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

A possible /. interview?

[sielwolf]

Ok we have seen a pretty consistent stream of articles about how Walmart/walmart.com have taken a decided interest in pushing non-MS OS machines (be they Linux based or clean).

But the 10k question is: who is behind this? I mean, this isn't like some normal free or open software guru we've known for ten years. Somebody at Walmart must be putting their John Hanncock on this.

Personally I'd like to get to know a little more about them (to congratulate them at least). Even more so I'd like a little more insight in to what got them started on this and how it all went down.

Short take of this Post: I wanna /. Interview! I'm sure it would go over huge.

To me this seems to be one of the first mainstream (outside of the IT industry and for endusers) acceptances of things most geeks hold dear. Who wants to miss this part of history?

Re:A possible /. interview?

[nolife]

I view this differently. The department store operation and computer selling in general is cut throat. Walmart needed a way to stand above the crowd and sell PC's for less then the competition. Walmart and Microtel got together and started offering cheap PC's with no OS at all. To 99.99% of computer users that planned to stay legal, the PC was useless, remember the first versions had a Winmodem so in theory, Linux was out also. Microtel switched modems and shortly there after started shipping with Lindows. Both Walmart and Microtel come out looking better because Walmart is getting more for there money and Microtel added very little cost to their bottom line. Now the same is happening with Mandrake. Mircotel ships a more stable full operation system with the PC's (no disto jokes, just making a point here). Again both companies gain. Walmart could probably care less what the hell the machine runs, as long as they are not paying any more for it, after all, they initally were happy selling it with nothing on it. I think Microtel's and more so Walmart's involvement in choosing Linux is next to null.

Re:the way walmart is

[miracle69]

I've actually suggested this exact thing on the Mandrake Forum.

Mandrake could increase market share by offering other resellers a "branded" OS, while making money on the support of the machines and the O.S.

Take Mandrake 8.2 and brand it to say, WalMart.

During Boot-up, Walmart gets screen space. They get a link on the desktop to Walmart.com. And Mandrake gets 30 bucks or so to do tech support for the OS.

If the big retailers pick up on this, Linux will be poised for a several percentage point growth. Combine this with an AOL client for Linux, and this could easily propel Linux into the mainstream desktop.