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Fry's Electronics - Selling Linux... Or Not?
TheMadPenguin writes "For those of you who may not be aware, Fry's Electronics has been selling a Linux desktop PC loaded with ThizLinux for quite a while now. The question is, are they really selling it? The answer is a definitive no."
They had one of these machines at their store in Houston. I fiddled around with it for a second and came to find out that the root password was blank. I told the sales guy this and he just asked me, "what's that?" I just left.
Do they sell linux?No
Oh, ok move along nothing to see here....
He would make for a poor Soup Opera writer.
fry's is a great place to find cheap odds and ends and assorted hardware. Of course they compensate by not hiring anyone who knows anything. Fry's is the candy store for someone who knows what they're doing. Why would you expect more?
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"Thiz Linux is not for sale."
5.) You want to "Think Different" without looking queer.
4.) You need an OS as unreliable as your '83 Ford Fairlane.
3.) It'll help you get a job. Oh wait, nevermind, it's not 1999 anymore.
2.) You have an extra $299 from your unemployment check.
1.) You want to make uglier friends.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
These people will not be getting my business. I insist on the ability to get a full refund from Red Hat if it comes with an OS I intend to erase anyway.
Hmmm, Doesn't this feel a bit like they're trying to sell you a OS-less PC? Either to appeal to people buying this, and throwing a pirated copy of Windows on it, or to sell the customer a copy of Windows along with the PC...
For those of you who may not be aware, Fry's Electronics has been selling a Linux desktop PC loaded with ThizLinux for quite a while now. The question is, are they really selling it? The answer is a definitive no.
First of all, their sales staff has no idea how to run Windows, let alone Linux. In reality, I didn't expect anything less from that caliber of employee. What are you going to do? Let's put it this way... I live in Las Vegas and have been to that Fry's location on more than one occasion and stood by while a salesman, approached with questions from a customer, stuttered and spit trying to come up with answers. They usually just end up blurting to the customer that the machine is "just NOT Windows". Nice sales pitch.
To top that award winning sales pitch off, the customer is staring at a KDM login screen which has it's default language set to Chinese. Don't get me wrong, Chinese is a fine language, but hardly appropriate sitting on display in the Las Vegas branch of Fry's Electronics. Not only did the whole Chinese thing confuse me, but the fact that it was running an obscure Linux distribution that nobody has ever heard of really did the trick. Check out their web site and tell me what you think. Where is the support? Even if you visit their 'English' site, it is a bit confusing to the average computer user.
To make things even worse, the distribution is old. It is running kernel 2.4.18 with KDE 2.2.2 as its default desktop, and their Xfree86 version is 4.2.0. It isn't even the latest release of ThizLinux. This is software more apt (no pun intended) to be used on a server system... not on a consumer desktop. Why not use one of the better desktop distros such as Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Libranet, or even (please forgive me for saying this but I have to) LindowsOS? They have better support and usability, are more appealing to the eye, and are far more likely to be accepted by end users than ThizLinux.
What really set me off was my visit to the Las Vegas store this evening. I was simply going to purchase a few peripherals and wandered by the lonely Linux PC in the corner. Sometimes the normally $299 unit goes on sale for around $100. Sure, it's a pretty cheaply built box, but would make a nice toy for such a low price. What caught my eye this time was the addition of a new placard placed squarely on top of the PC chassis. It read something like this:
This computer is running the Linux operating system. It is easily removed and can be replaced by Windows 98 or higher by formatting the hard drive and loading Windows. We will perform this service for you for a fee.
I found that completely unacceptable for two reasons:
They are immediately telling you that the machine is no good. Insinuating that it's in the best interest of the customer to remove the current operating system and install Windows is ridiculous. Even though the sign does not come right out and say "This OS is a piece of garbage", the sign conveys the message loud and clear.
They are offering to charge the customer more money to fix a product which they are selling as 'broken' to begin with. Nothing like wearing your soul on your sleeve. Actually, this way of thinking is pure Microsoft. Since they are selling a product they know is garbage, why sell it at all? To be quite honest, as a Linux user I frown upon the insinuation that my chosen OS is somehow inferior to Windows 98.
Maybe I shouldn't care... and in reality it isn't going to make a difference in my day whether they sell those boxes or not. It just bothers me that Linux is being portrayed this way to the general public. My message to the people who run Fry's Electronics (and any other outlet who may sell Linux PCs) is simple: If you are going to sell Linux boxes, please educate your staff on the subject, rather than allowing them to sound ignorant in front of your customers. It is an embarrassment to you as much as it is to the Linux community. Since you are selling Linux boxes, please make sure that they are set with a langua
And can explain how they came to be selling THIS machine? I mean. I totally understand how you can staff clueless people as most electronics store employees are pretty clueless or just FUD-injected. But who made the decision to sell this unit? Seems pretty poor to me.
If you are going to sell something, it needs to be a quality product. This goes for anything. I just don't understand how a big retailer like Frys can end up with something like this on their shelves.
A decent box running a current popular distro advertised as a cheap webbox could certainly sell IMHO, but not this.
HOW DID THIS GET PAST THE PHB?
- Linux is the stolen property of SCO.
- Sales of stolen property are null and void by law.
Q.E.D.taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
The thing that really scares me after hearing this is that the rest of the computer sales world is, by and large, well below Fry's in terms of knowledge and selection. The Fry's I frequented in Sacramento was full of people who could tell me the average failure rates of the brand name RAM vs. their generic stuff, whether a 5400 or 7200 RPM hard drive would make a difference, etc. When I moved to Washington, DC and found that the best computer store around was MicroCenter -- a horribly overpriced, understaffed, and generally terrible store -- I about cried. More to the point of this story, though, if Fry's is this clueless about Linux, I hate to see the rest of the computer stores out there attempting to sell it. Heaven knows that may cause a step *backwards* in terms of adoption by the general public!
How To Get Humans To Mars
I dont think it's the OS mostly though I would of preferred to see Redhat or SuSE installed. The hardware of the machine is subpar to the extreme IMO. But what can you expect for 200 dollars which is the common sales price for that PC.
I hate to knock fry's since I'm a regular at the new Irving TX store but Wal-Mart ships better Linux pc's.
I'd rather see PC's shipped without a OS installed and leave it up to the consumer. However there needs to be a few desktop app's that are not on Linux at the moment such as out of the box DVD playback (Even if it's commercial).
2) I suspect the point of the "Windows can be easily installed..." sign is not to enrage you by dissing Lunix but to attract the borrowed-or-warezed-Windows-CD crowd.
3) The claim that WalMart is "doing an excellent job" seems odd given that their Linux boxes are catalog only. I think what they're doing is great but if they were selling them on the floor between bottled water and Barney coloring books, I wouldn't expect brilliant presenattion from them either.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You can go about your business. Move along.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Well maybe this isn't new as I'm fairly new to the Linux scene, but why does everyone seem to think Linux is ready for the average consumer? I don't have a problem with selling Linux computers, but you can NOT expect them to sell well. Seriously, the average person is the root of the tech jokes about the "any" key and the white-out on the monitor. Linux is becoming very nice, sophisticated, etc. but it just is not there yet.
... it's how you say it. The sign over the display PC reads (paraphrased by article's author):
This computer is running the Linux operating system. It is easily removed and can be replaced by Windows 98 or higher by formatting the hard drive and loading Windows. We will perform this service for you for a fee.
Had they said that it's running ThizLinux and could be changed to any PC OS, I might be a bit more understanding. But they're just trying to sell computers without the MS tax, and increase their OS sales.
The text showing up in Chinese could be the result of someone messing with the computer, rather than Fry's setting it up badly. OTOH, the author does a good job vilifying the Fry's staff.
Cheap boxes are good for small standalone terminals and for Joe Sixpack checking his email. Cheap boxes that make Linux look as awful as the article states are not helping our cause. If it were a single store, I would suggest a user group get involved. Being a chain store, the manager may be unwilling (or unable) to improve things.
Fry's will sell just about anything if you can get in to the right people with little regard for quality. This just emphasizes that. If it is something they think will move, they'll try it.
You also have to be careful, because Fry's will take an item in as a return from a customer, and will shrink-wrap it and put it back on the shelf. Supposedly with a label, though I've bought shrink wrapped items that did not have a label and were obviously somebody's returns.
I returned a web-cam that did not work, and they put it with stuff to be "returned to shelf". Moral here, if you see a lot of items with "return" labels on them, outnumbering the non-returned items, avoid that product as most seem to be returning it for whatever reason and Fry's is just putting it back on the shelf.
I also purchased SuSE 8.0 Professional the weekend it was on the shelf, only to find out one enterprising person stole the CDs out of the box. I get the box home, open it up, and no CDs or DVD. I had to fight with two store managers and threaten public disclosure (hint: asking them for their first and last name and for them to spell it for you will often make the managers nervous) and who knows what just to get them to exchange the product so I could get disks. [The first box had no signs of tampering.] I opened the second box in front of the manager before leaving the store just to make sure I got the disks that time.
As a customer of Fry's I have had to return about 50% of the computer components I have purchased from them. Either they were DOA, they did not work reliably if they did work, or they would fail within about 48 to 72 hours. [Just to be fair, others I've talked to have not had the same experience, however I shopped at 2 different Frys in the Bay Area with the same results.]
The SuSE incident is also the last time I shopped at Fry's for anything other than a cable.
I'm also about to find out how well they honor their "extended warranty". I bought a five disk DVD player for the house (my wife bought it as an anniversary gift), less than a year ago, and now it failing too.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The fry's in san diego sold out of their Thizlinux boxes quickly. One of the local LUG guys bought one, struggled with the interface (he couldn't find the counsel) then stripped the OS and installed RH. He was very happy with his ~100$ box afterwards.
In the UK here we have PC World, a chain of large out of town stores owned by the wonderful Dixons Stores Group (who also own Dixons, Currys and founded Freeserve).
Anyway, the staff in these places are generally pretty braindead. There are exceptions - two friends of mine currently work in our local branch and they do know their stuff, but most of the staff just read whatever it says on the card next to the PC. Their technical support staff in the little in-store kiosks are usually dire. They know next to nothing about maintenance. I worked for a local company doing much the same thing, and we saw many a PC the guys at PC World had 'repaired'. One they deemed totally dead, never to work again actually turned out to have two bent pins on the hard disk. PCW kept it on a shelf for about 2 weeks before saying it was kaput.
This isn't to say PCW are totally bad though. They've lately started stocking a lot of OEM kit, and case mods. Their prices are coming down, and the range of kit they sell is pretty good. Rough with the smooth I guess.
Has anyone seen the PCs or Thiz Linux? The PC makes an e-machine look like a super computer... it's absolute crap complete with a Cyrix chipset. As far as Thiz Linux goes, it is also crap... If SCO wants to go after Linux, we ought to feed them Thiz Linux as a diversion. It's a stripped down e-mail, word processor, MP3 Player, and cheesy Web Browser. That's it! I hear users still preferred their speak-n-spell over Thiz Linux.
During the Vegas Fry's grand opening in Feb, these were on sale fr $99. Specs: 30gb, 128mb, 56k, 10/100, C3 733mhz, 52x, keyboard, mouse. Seems like at least $100 worth of file server hardware to me. I tried to leave ThizLinux on it, and configure Samba and all that, but in the end it was a huge headache, and no matter which panel (of 3) to configure the NIC, I still couldn't get online with it. So, I put Win2k on it, and used the included driver disk to get everything running. The driver disk installs all the drivers and handles all the reboots for you. Couldn't be easier to convert to WIndows.
I think that is the purpose of this machine. It avoids the Windows Tax, and introduces people to Linux, which is far from user friendly. As for the decision to include this distro over others, who knows? Maybe Thiz gave them a better deal on media? Maybe they gave more support for creating the install image (not that it did any good). I don't know. It's still a pretty kickass machine for 1 bill.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
.
DALLAS, TX - November 3, 1998 -- The call came in sometime after midnight. As soon as COO Kersten was informed that Fry's Electronics was calling, he rushed to the telephone.
"I immediately sensed the limitless potential. My own customer experiences with Fry's were so excruciatingly painful that I was overwhelmed with the possibilities of a relationship. They are truly Jedis of Customer Disservice", from whom I could learn much," Kersten stated.
Kersten was flattered to learn that Fry's was calling to talk business. Company President John Fry wanted to purchase APATHY Demotivators(tm), thousands of them. He had seen the design during a visit to his local post office, and felt it perfectly articulated their own indifferent sentiments towards customers. In completing the transaction, Fry's became the largest single customer of APATHY poster outside of the government sector.
"It is a wonderful irony that the company that turned Customer Disservice into an artform has entered into a relationship with the company that turned it into artwork. We couldn't be more flattered, offered Kersten on the purchase.
In reply, Fry offered, "This will keep our employees from losing sight of what is important. -- Nothing."
At one point, during a conversation with Fry, the notoriously unemotional Kersten found himself choked up with tears. His personal secretary and confidante of ten years, "Hey You", later commented that they had revealed some radical new techniques for Customer Disservice"; they intended to test in their Dallas store.
Kersten declined to reveal details, saying only, "How much does body armor go for these days" This led some to speculate that Fry's may be considering shooting customers at random to gauge subsequent buying patterns.
Fry's legendary indifference to customer service, although occasionally drawing criticism and media scrutiny, has only led to increased loyalty amongst their customer base and continued explosive growth. Analysts theorize that Fry.s customer base, heavily skewed towards poorly socialized, pure geek demographics, may actually derive some erotic gratification from the masochistic purchasing experience.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I bought machine from Frys with ThizLinux around one year ago. Back then it was pretty decent small linux box for very cheap price (around $400). It was cheapest PC they sold at the moment and I needed new small linux machine.
:)
The fact that it runs some linux distro was imprtant for me that hardware is compatible with Linux.
The first thing I did was to reformat it with RedHat Linux
Machine works perfectly and I am very happy.
I bought one with the SiS chipset and 1.1 GHz AMD Duron processor for $229. The hardware works, but you do get what you pay for.
The first thing you absolutely have to do is expand the memory. 32 Mb of the RAM is used for video so expanding it from 128 Mb (96 Mb useable) to at least 256 Mb (224 Mb useable) is mandatory. KDE barely loads in the original (128/96 Mb) configuration. I'm using 256/224 Mb right now and it is much better.
There is a reason why the KDE menu includes uninstall instructions, as does the manual. ThizLinux is a piece of unmitigated garbage and even they know it. It looks like a bastardized version of RedHat 8 converted to a combination of Chinese and English (Thiz is based in Hong Kong). Fry's probably receives these machines as-is from Hong Kong or China.
Now, as far as Linux distros that work on this machine, I'm typing this on my Fry's machine running Slackware 9 right now. It seems to work fine. RedHat 8 also works OK (as well as RH8 has ever worked but better than ThizLinux).
Mandrake 9.1 is a problem. The sound doesn't work (ALSA driver problem? It works in Slackware and RH8 with no ALSA) and neither does the wheel in the mouse (but it does see it as the middle button). Everything else seems OK, but I don't recommend Mandrake for this machine. It may be useable, but it shouldn't require this much work.
The SuSE 8.2 Live-Eval CD doesn't work with this chipset either. Don't even bother to try it. X won't even start. I tried installing it 4 times and it never was functional. That doens't mean a "regular" SuSE install won't work, but I don't have the full distro so I haven't tried it.
I haven't tried Debian, RH9, FreeBSD, Gentoo, or any other distro. They may work or they may not.
Same with any version of Windows. I would guess that at least Win98 would work. Based on other "odd" hardware I've tried to install it on, Windows 2000 might be a problem, but I haven't tried it on this box since I don't have it.
Overall, my recommendation for this cheap hardware is Slackware 9. This machine should only be purchased by those who can install their own OS.
Microsoft's VP of Customer Service is Helen Waite. If you are having problems with their products go to Helen Waite.
WalMart's description of Suse notes:
Oh NO! I can just hear it now...
Newb 1: "I'm going to install Linux"
Newb 2: "Do you want Frys with that?"
(Rim-shot)
Godwin's law states that any usenet flamefest will eventually degenerate into comparisons with Nazis, or something to that effect.
Have we replaced Nazis with SCO, such that any slashdot discussion will eventually end up with comparisons to SCO?
I like it!
Infuriate left and right
I had an experience at Fry's recently that changed my view somewhat. I had purchased one of those ECS K7S5A Pro mobos with a bare Athlon CPU. I've set up the K7S5A a few times before so I know what to expect. This one had some serious problems, and rather than do some CPU swapping to see if it was the mobo or CPU I just took the whole thing back.
The person I dealt with didn't ask me what was wrong; he just printed off a return/restock label and proceeded to give me a refund. I said, "Uh, there's something wrong with this particular combo. It had [description of actual failure mode] and should be tested before returning it to stock." He then printed out a different label indicating testing required and put it in the other bin. I asked him what they'd do and he said it would indeed get tested.
I had forgotten to bring in the cables that came with the bundle, tho; took that in the next day and found the same guy who did the return. His jaw literally dropped when he realized I came back in just for this; he thanked me profusely and went over to his supervisor to show him and point me out (I had already walked away). I thought for a minute they were going to hoist me on their shoulders and parade me around the store.
So I think Fry's has created a problem with its liberal return policy; people must just want them to take the stuff back, so they don't volunteer any information that might endanger that. If so, I lament this "lowering of the bar". I just did what I thought was right, and clearly that's not what most people do. Bummer.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Oh, sorry. That was me. What else is there to do in Fry's but fiddle with the stuff they're selling.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The article's attitude bewilders me. Fry's is doing a good thing by distributing Linux-based machines, and letting people avoid the hidden MS tax. Why slap them in the face?
It's true that these boxes come with a lot of prominently displayed info on how to erase Linux and install Windows. So what? Let's be realistic -- Windows has 98% of the desktop market.
The article gives the impression that ThizLinux is a totally crippled OS. Well, I'm currently running FreeBSD on both my Fry's machines, but I did play with ThizLinux for a little while when I got the first machine. Everything was in English, not Chinese. It seemed like quite a nice system for somebody naive about computers. You could surf, send e-mail, word-process, and play games. Guess what? -- that's all your typical home user wants to do with a computer! It's true that the ThizLinux web site seems to be only in Chinese, but I'm sure plenty of people in China use Linux distros that have English-only web sites.
I've been very happy with these machines. For $150-250 (the prices fluctuates based on the phases of the moon), I got hardware that feels essentially the same as my wife's $2000 new iMac. I've never had any hardware problems at all. My only complaint was that some of the hardware documentation was a little skimpy and/or incomplete. I did have to buy an external modem for my home box because it apparently came with a Winmodem. Also, they seemed to have changed sound chips between the time when I bought the first machine and the time when I bought the second one, and I was never able to get sound working on the second one -- maybe someone with a little more savvy would've been able to solve that problem.
The Walmart Linux boxes seem to get all the attention, but I'd recommend the Fry's machines to a friend instead. For one thing, you can buy them in the store, which saves you money on shipping, whereas AFAIK the Walmart boxes are only available online.
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or, in my case, a definitive 404 not found
Let's read between the lines, shall we:
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, warez monkeys. Here's a cheap and reasonably fast box you can rebuild with that Devil's 0wn copy of Windows XP you've had stashed in your bedroom since you leeched it from that Russian FTP server. We won't ask any questions, even though you don't have a beard or sandals. ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Fry's is a place to go when you know what you want and you know how to use it. Never expect an honest and/or correct answer from a Fry's employee. The honest comes from the fact that it's a retail outlet, and the correct comes from the fact that they pay as little as possible. That is why, on average, 50% of the employees of any given Fry's store will be asian girls. They have small fingers which are good for hitting the buttons on cash registers, and no one expects them to know anything. (Whether they do or not, well, that's up to you, but none of the ones I've talked to at any Fry's have known their ass from... what's that round thing in the ground over there?)
However Fry's can be a great place for you to pick up items on the cheap if you are close enough to get their sale circulars. They are definitely one of the stores with the least clue about the internet, they owned their domain for YEARS before they did anything with it, even a phone numbers/locations page, and their locations don't map or anything. They do some online sales through outpost.com but that's guaranteed to be their least exciting deals because you know they wouldn't bother putting anything with a lot of price fluctuation online. If you go to Fry's once a week, or read the ad circular, you WILL end up seeing a ton of items for good prices. These items will never be a motherboard, memory, or a CPU, unless you end up with most of a system (needing drives and video for example.) Their video cards are also always horrendously overpriced, as are cables, which is no shock.
(A word on cables: Always buy cables over the internet unless you know someone at a computer store who will get them for you at cost. A cable that costs $25 at fry's will cost you $5 via mail order, this is literal, I just got the cable in the mail, and it's a 6 to 6 pin 6' 1394 cable.)
In general I have had little trouble returning things to Fry's (I've never purchased software there though - at those prices? ha ha!) but I have definitely noticed the problem you describe where people return things broken and they just re-shelf 'em. What's really amusing is that people are constantly returning boxes with the wrong (old) product in them, and THOSE end up back on the shelf. Once I purchased a LVD SCSI controller from Fry's and got it home only to discover that it had an ISA Fast/Narrow SCSI card in the box. Needless to say I was pretty pissed and I took it back and I was pissed enough to where they didn't argue, in fact they gave me $20 off the better SCSI controller I ended up purchasing because the card I bought had gone off the market. Well, the card I thought I'd purchased, anyway.
So, to make sure you don't get ripped off, open everything before you buy it. Shit, I've been known to open spindles of CDR media while standing in the aisle to find out what color they were, back when that mattered. Anything that looks like it might have been tampered with gets opened up and rooted through and if I don't like it, it goes right back on the shelf like that, fuck 'em. That's what they get for not running a tighter ship.
If anyone is wondering what Fry's IS good for, besides returning your bad hardware in the box for some other, probably newer hardware, and getting a free upgrade; They often have sales on CDR media or assorted home electronics like DVD players. Their open box deals (this only helps you if you live close and go often) can get you some great stuff; I passed on them like a dolt but they had two $300-retail progressive scan dvd/svcd/vcd/mp3/photocd players (a real brand, not apex or something) for $99 each, I should have bought them both and then taken back whichever one was wonkier. And when they have a sale on cases, that's a good way to get a case at a good price without paying sales tax. They're also a reasonably economical and convenient way to get electronic components, heat shrink tubing, and so on.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd be pretty pissed off at you if you recommended I buy a machine with a nonfunctional modem and no sound. :-)
The modem and sound worked fine with ThizLinux. I couldn't get them to work with Mandrake or FreeBSD, but I'm not a guru, and it's possible that someone sufficiently knowledgeable would have been able to get them to work. There is some documentation about the sound chip, but I just wasn't able to use it to get sound working on FreeBSD. Since the ThizLinux kernel is GPL'd, and includes a driver for the Winmodem, I assume you can get the driver from ThizLinux, if you know enough Chinese to navigate their web site
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I spent 3 years at the Fry's Corporate Headquarters as a consultant doing various Linux stuff for them. Note that this does NOT mean I worked for Fry's in the sense that I'm a drooling moron who can't tie his shoelaces without instructions. Actually, even that description is a bit inaccurate; Fry's has a videoconferencing network set up where vendors give technical product information to the sales associates so they at least have some foundation of knowledge with which to answer technical customer questions. I suspect that the popular perception of their associates comes from the fact that retail shops only exist because people want to feel superior or special somehow, and the folks on slashdot are at some extreme of the personality spectrum where they feel some overriding need to talk down to people at Fry's, or something. The associates in Fremont and Sunnyvale (the highest grossing store in the chain) actually know stuff like whether a motherboard will take DDR or what this onboard IDE raid thing means, for example; they're not all complete morons, especially now that they're picking up semi-technical people who got hit when the bubble burst.
One day at the corporate office when I was doing the ISP thing for them (John Fry had a hard-on for doing an ISP because he wants to be in some business with low-cost recurring service revenue, or something), they drop one of these boxes in my lap and said "give me your opinion of this thing". So I poke around and find out that it's a cheapo Asian Linux distribution with the then-amazing Linux port of PowerDVD so users could play DVDs on their Linux machine. Someone else and I grabbed a random sample DVD from the buyer's cubicles (an awful horror movie iirc) and tried to play it - worked mostly fine.
Then they wanted me to come up with installation procedures for Windows on the machines. I asked them why so I would have some context, and John did everything but say outright that they wanted to sell a machine that people could put their own operating system on. The reason why is because Fry's has this low price leader mentality where they feel something's wrong unless they have the lowest price on a certain product, and the Windows tax is applied pretty equally among the large computer manufacturers. The idea is that they could undercut everyone if they had a computer without an operating system... the fact that we were going to be supplying something with the machines (a set of instructions for installing Windows on the machines) demonstrated how important this was to them, because as a rule Fry's doesn't sell anything except what the vendor sticks in the box.
Regarding the posts about how there are people in the buying chain who understand Linux - yes, there are. There was a buyer who did do mainly Linux stuff, and had little stuffed penguins spread around his desk all the time. I was in there a lot asking about whether we would be carrying various things, or letting him know where he can get stuff from Loki to put on the shelves. At one point, they actually stuck the Wasabi distribution of NetBSD on the shelves, although it didn't sell very well.
Linux is actually pretty important for Fry's - at one point they were selling more of it than Windows, although I'm not sure that's still true now that the "hobbyist" feel is fading. The fact that Linux was outselling Windows was one of the main driving factors for Fry's to start sticking various infrastructure systems on Linux instead of Netware or Windows, which is what they've run in the past. They're still mostly Netware or Windows, but they're looking real hard at moving parts of outpost.com (their online sales group) onto Linux from Oracle/BEA/Solaris.
-- thalakan
"Maybe I shouldn't care... and in reality it isn't going to make a difference in my day whether they sell those boxes or not. It just bothers me that Linux is being portrayed this way to the general public. My message to the people who run Fry's Electronics (and any other outlet who may sell Linux PCs) is simple: If you are going to sell Linux boxes, please educate your staff on the subject, rather than allowing them to sound ignorant in front of your customers. It is an embarrassment to you as much as it is to the Linux community. Since you are selling Linux boxes, please make sure that they are set with a language appropriate to your locale. If your local to France, sell a French 'speaking' machine. It's that simple. One last thing: Load a distribution that is consumer friendly. This should have been consideration number one, but since you missed it entirely, I'm pointing it out now."
I agree with this, but I also realize that the people in these stores are not computer experts of ANY kind. They can't answer questions about Windows either, although they are more inclined to react to Windows questions with something out of their own experience.
One of the biggest problems with Windows right now in fact is that there is so little DEFINITIVE reference material on it from a users point of view. Microsoft stopped documenting anything beyond the APIs a long time ago and now everything your read about Windows is speculation. Diagnosing Windows problems has gotten to be a voodoo art more than a well defined process. All the more reason for it to wind up in the sh*t can of history where it belongs.
As far as the bad version of Linux this thing is running, I bet the hardware AND software came bundled to Fry's from China at a super bargain price.
On the other hand, if my intention was to buy a cheap machine to run Linux on, I'd feel a lot better about getting one of these than one of the cheap Windows machines. Chances are the cheap Linux machine has more generic components that will operate with ANY version of Linux, while the Windows machines are more likely to include some proprietary component to make you either dependent on the manufacturer, Microsoft, or both.
If I were in the market for a laptop right now I'd probably get one of those $700 Lindows version and then install Debian on it. I bet it would work just fine.