Three LindowsOS PCs Reviewed

Eugenia writes "Not one, but three LindowsOS-based PCs (in the value range of $199 USD) were reviewed online by WashingtonPost. A TigerDirect PC, the traditional WalMart/MicrotelPC and one from Nova Computech. The reviewer says that these PCs while are very low-end today, compared to PCs 2 years ago, are actually pretty good solutions for home usage. The reviewer found them lacking in the gaming (no respectable 3D gfx card included), expandibility departments and while he mentions that Linux-based LindowsOS is affordable, is not a panacea as it lacks in good USB support and other demanding areas of our modern times."

Comments

a 3 gig drive !

[Squarewav]

what year is this again 1998?? so after the OS that leaves what 1.5 gigs, I guess they would make good dumb X terminals. good luck doing anything else

Re:a 3 gig drive !

[nolife]

A drive that size would not matter in a small office environment either, where all data (in theory) would be held on a server, not on the machine itself.

Not just small offices either. Our laptops and desktops have a minimum of 20GB drives and some are as large as 60GB. The average user has less then 2.5GB total including our non space optimized W2K installs. The most I have ever seen was 5GB from a user that stored backup.pst files from our Exchange servers locally.

no, very sophisticated ispell

[jtheory]

It also apparently lacks Ispell.

Sure, the *English* word is panacea.

But the GREEK word that panacea is derived from is "panakeia" -- spelled as in the posting -- meaning (like the English word) a cure-all.

I am not making this up:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pana cea

Not what i got....

[222]

Im not sure at which point this year he picked these machines up, but within the past month ive picked up a few of the walmart variety, and ive got to say that theyre fine. I purchased the 200 dollar model and i got a 1.2GHz Duron,128,nic,sound,video,20GB HD...(Ironically, im installing mandrake on one now).
For the low low price of just 217 (My shipping was much lower than his?), i got this guy shipped right to my doorstep. Honestly, theyre great. Fantastic.
Although i wasnt the biggest supporter of Lindows before, after seeing it in action, it really is what my grandmother would need to use Linux. (It even comes with a recovery CD)
Its also worth mentioning that for an extra couple hundred (was $397 for me with shipping) you can have a 14.1 inch flatpanel included with that. As far as the quality goes, its nothing id use for proffesional imaging, but for surfing and sims its more than fine.
Sounds like a deal to me.
And NO, i dont work for walmart.com :p

Good value

[h00pla]

On a business/pleasure trip to the US back in October (2002) , I bought a Lindows machine from Walmart. I ordered the modem for it and that brought the price up to 226 USD (because where I was going to be staying didn't have DSL in the area). The keyboard was total crap, but I went to a local mall and forked over some cash for a decent one. Lindows pretty much did everything I needed it to do and it ran pretty well. First thing I did was to create a user account for myself. (don't wanna be running as root, do we?)

When my trip was finished, it fit into my big Samsonite and I took it back with me. I did two things when I got back home - move the power supply button to 220 and the switch the OS to SuSE Linux. I changed to SuSE because I like that distro more than Michael Robertson's 'apt-get' for a fee'. That's the weakest part of the whole deal.

I just put Red Hat 9 on the box about a week ago. It runs a little slower, but pretty well all in all. I think it was a good value. It's on all the time and it stands up pretty well. If it runs for a year, it's paid itself back.

Just bought the $200 Wal-Mart machine

[EisPick]

I've had it for a few days now. A few reactions:

• Only real disappointment is the lack of an AGP slot. You're stuck with the onboard video.
• Wal-Mart promised a 10 GB hard drive, but it shipped with a 20 GB.
• I got a no-OS box and installed Red Hat 9, so I can't speak about Lindows. But I can say RH9 installed easily with no driver problems.
• 128 MB of RAM just isn't enough for RH9, X-Windows and a few apps. I spent $25 for another 128 MB (it takes PC133).
• The Post article said shipping costs $80. I'm guessing that's for overnight. I paid $25 for UPS ground. So my total out-of-pocket was $200 + $25 shipping + $25 RAM for a decent machine that's faster than the Win98 machine it's sitting next to (that cost $800 when I bought it a few years ago).
• The fan is a little louder than I'd like, but that's not surprising for a Duron-powered machine. But it's maybe 1.25 x as loud as your average PC, so it's not horrible.

Happy with our 4...

[alexhmit01]

We set 4 of them up for junior employees... They happily chug away with Mandrake on them. Lindows was kind of neat, but we wanted machines that would listen to our LDAP server (running OS X). We just mount the OS X Users share point via NFS and away they go. Each machine has Mozilla on it plus an email application, and they are useful for our web researchers.

They don't have the maintenance headache (and cost) of a Windows machine, and are cheaper than the eMacs that we otherwise use for low end computing.

Alex

Conspiracy!

[arvindn]

The submitter is Eugenia Loli-Queru, who regularly writes "reviews" on OSnews.com that the /. crowd usually considers to be flamebait.

Just mentioning what I happened to notice. Conclusions, if any, are left to the reader.