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Wal-Mart Lindows PCs Selling Well
andyring writes "CNN.com is reporting that sales of the $199 PCs have exceeded expectations. Although CNN terms them "full fledged, if low power," it seems customers don'd mind all that much if their computer does not run Windows and doesn't carry an Intel processor. Slashdot covered two reviews of those machines July 4."
Since USD and EUR are currently almost the same value as each other, they should retail for 199 EUR. Anything more and your getting ripped off. Now I havent seen any pc sold for that price in the UK (£249 is the lowest I've seen, which is about 400 EUR). If they can retail something like that in this price I WOULD be impressed!
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
Actually that would be $199 before VAT (which averages about 22%). Also the higher costs of doing business in Europe mean that prices should be a little higher (snobbism costs money).
I bought one in September to eval.
The 800 Mhz Via CPU is roughly equivalent to a 400 Mhz Celeron.
I popped in a 1.2 Ghz Celeron for $62 and it runs Much Better.
The 10 GB drive is also Very slow.
I could have built a much better machine for a little more money. Still, it isn't a bad deal.
I booted Lindows and took a quick look before blowing it away. It was really cheesy, with major pieces requiring additional purchase.
I bought one when my AMD K6-2 450 finally died and it's case was donated to my cats (they love old cases). Anyways, I just wanted a cheap system to turn into a simple home server. It works perfect. I've got it running RH8.0, Samba, a firewall/gateway setup using IPTables, DHCP server and I'll soon be adding some MP3 streaming so I can listen to MP3's all over the house. It has yet to dissapoint me, despite the lag when I'm on it (since I'm only actually on it 4 hours a week or so for tweaking). All in all, it's a great warm body machine (for when anything w/ a pulse will do).
DONT PANIC
>Why the things here are so much expensive than in the US?
Because, for whatever reason it is, people in europe have traditionally let companies, big and small, walk all over them. Or so it seems to a Canadian who has made various trips to the UK.
If you just quit buying anything that's more expensive than it is in North America, you'd get your prices down.
But, for some reason, I see amazing amounts of people in England driving cars that cost nearly twice as much as they do in America, or at least they are including taxes in the UK. Example: Base Corolla in Canada: $15 290 CDN or $18 645 CDN with taxes. Base Corolla in UK: 10 795 GBP [with or without taxes, I'm not sure what your laws are there] ($26 514 CDN). This applies to almost all other vehicles I've seen over there.
It's simple: Buy used until the retailers get their prices back down to earth. Buying smaller doesn't help because it doesn't send the right message. Just don't buy new. That will send the message.
Oh well... I know that won't happen. I remember how most of the cars in the UK were shiny new compared to the ones in Canada, and especially the US.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Walmart sells 25% of the computer/console games sold in the US. They WILL NOT carry a game with an M rating. Period. Game publishers are faced with three choices if they choose to make a game more racy than Metroiid Prime:
1 - Make a WalMart version of the game.
2 - Alter the game to get a T reating.
3 - Tell Walmart to shove it.
id software has already tiold Walmart to shove it. They know that people will buy their games no matter what.
Most other game publishers are not in the financial position that id software is. They end up taking options 1 or 2. That XXX bike game removed all of the nudity in order to get a T rating and thus avoid the WalMart blacklist. 3DRealms sold a Walmart version of Duke Nukem 3D in order to avoid the WalMart blackout.
While I believe that retailors have the right to not carry products they do not want, I also see that WalMart has enough market pull to affect the purchasing choices that even non-WalMart shoppers have.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
When I bought mine, I had my choice between Mandrake and Lindows. I chose Lindows so I could see what it was like. It's umm.. yucky.
But then I'm not a fan of Linux for the desktop in general. The GUI's are too inconsistent between apps for my taste.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
I bought one. I'm a programmer, with most of my work on UNIX. I, however, have to get to the UNIX box through a MicroSh*t Windows box, and have to also use Word and Excel. To be honest, I'm sick of it....
In all honesty, I'm not so thrilled with Lindows. There was no documentation, they did away with man (although most everthing is there in their "documents" tool), and promised software didn't seem to be installed. No biggie, I went and got it for free from the 'net.
I will probably end up putting Mandrake or Red Hat on it when I've got more time...
The big thing was I needed to set up a home network with printer sharing and it would have been more of a hassle to try to upgrade my Pentium 150 so that I could load a Linux Distro and all the hassles of dealing with old, proprietary Packard Bell components.
This thing got me up and running fast and cheap. I'll by the speed demon PC later....
BTW, there's no way in Hell I'd put a pirated copy of XP (or Me, 9x, NT) on this computer. It is blissfully MS free!
~whidbey
Just to be sure that people don't think the above post is a troll, I'd like to say that this is my observation as well. Having talked to Michael (Lindows' CEO), I know that the only thing he brings to the Linux desktop is a large rolodex, and a used-car-salesman attitude.
I also spoke to Cliff Beshers, their technical lead, and I was even less impressed. At least Michael knows what he brings to the party - we may not thing it's the right thing, but at least it's honest about it - but Cliff shouldn't have the word "technical" in his title anywhere.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
The VIA CPU is a reincarnation of the old IDT/centaur winchip. Via purchased both centaur and cyrix after they both flopped at making x86 CPUs.
The Via c3 has only one integer unit and one fp unit, coupled with a decent-sized cache. Architecturally, the via c3 is extremely primitive, worse than the original pentium. The c3 benchmark scores are consistently about 1/3rd to 1/4th those of a celeron or a duron at the same clock speed.
That tragic this is: putting an AMD duron in this machine would have tripled the performance, and would have costed only about $10 more. The $199 lindows box was likely intended to be a no-profit "crippleware" machine, to lure people to the $299 and $399 models.
That's not true.
All of the Wal-Marts I've been to (and I live in Arkansas, world HQ of Wal-Mart) have and still do carry GTA3, Soldier of Fortune, Hitman 2, and a number of other decidedly violent games, complete with M ratings.
Why this dissasociated policy exists, with the censored music and magazine covers, I don't know. But they do carry R rated movies and M rated games all the time.
Uh, really? Debian Official ISO Mirrors
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
LindowsOS is pretty easy.. For those without an ISP it comes with a sign-up tool for Earthlink dial-up and Speakeasy DSL, instructions on configuring KPPP, a PPPoE configuration wizard, etc.
I personally like the interface much better than Mandrake's configuration stuff, which is a pain to find, and is not consistent with the rest of the system. IMO Mandrake should stop designing their blurry interfaces that look different (especially the installer...) and try to make them more consistent with the other apps on the system (or make those apps consistent with their stuff).
TigerDirect sold out of theri entire stock of 2000+ Lindows computers in less then two weeks... but then again, Slashdot readers wouldn't even know that they were for sale there!
The TigerDirect Lindows machine sold for $230.00 and had a 900 meg Duron CPU, 128 megs of RAM, a 20 gig HD, Modem, decent video, NIC, etc. They sold over 2000 of them in less then two weeks and have been out of stock for several more (apparently this machine was one of the biggest sellers in their history).
The big flaw with Lindows is the Click-N-Run package (it was discussed in an article previously here on /. but i don't have time to hunt it down right now).
Point of it was, it'd be great... Lindows is good, Click-N-Run sucks. Thats how you have to get all your apps. You get 10 free downloads from their junk aisle or something. And there were questions about what if the download fails, does it still count? and what about making backups of your downloaded software (definately not for a novice). Also, supposedly (i have no 1st hand knowledge) some of the software Click-N-Run charges for is avail. for free elsewhere on the web (OpenOffice?). But, i guess they're charging for the convenience of downloading it from them and whatever else their client software does.
As far as just Lindows goes, the UI is okay, and the existing apps are still more than you get with a base install of windows (sans bundled software). But it's in no way complete. Also, the target market for this machine is probably not going to have DSL/Cable, so those Click-N-Run downloads (if they go for them) are going to take a while.
So, Lindows=NotBad Click-N-Run=JustRun
DONT PANIC