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Walmart Expands Low-End Linux Notebook Offerings
startleman writes "A story on Tom's Hardware reports that Walmart apparently will offer a Linare-equipped notebook below the $500 mark. Manufacturer Linare said that it will bring a Linux-based device to the retailer 'within the next few days.' Specs include an AMD Athlon 1800+, a 40 GByte harddrive, 128 MByte memory, a CD-ROM drive, an Ethernet port and the firm's Linare OS as well as Open Office."
Are the drivers for these things freely available?
Sometimes when you buy a linux machine, it comes with binary drivers that make it hard to run with a mainstream distro.
But this is being sold through the web site, not at the stores. Most of the people who buy them probably read about them here at slashdot. I doubt that they sell very many.
I tend to see this as one giant corporate bully giving another giant corporate bully notice. Walmart pushes everyone they buy from to lower their prices. This is just their way of trying to muscle MS.
Before Christmas, I saw a complete HP system at Wal-Mart for $468. It was a WinXP box with 256MB of RAM and a monitor. It even came with a CD burner.
Wal-Mart's just trying to break through that price level. It probably ain't going to happen unless MS takes a smaller cut.
My only worry is that the average, everday consumer will see Linux only on low end machines and equate the operating system with cheapness. And I don't mean "cheap" as in cost, but in terms of quality.
Why am I not rapping? I am rapping with you in a way.
If it's Linare and Wal*Mart then what's this about??
No sig for you!!
From looking at the screenshots (http://www.linare.com/screenshots.php) it looks like it's probably based on Red Hat (uses Disk Druid, and the same "time zone" selection screen as Red Hat anyway.
I agree, they seem rather fishy, I can't find any reference to GPL or ANY license for that matter on their site, even when trying to purchase the product. According to their list of software they are also including some commercial apps (i.e. RealPlayer). I would think they are legally obligated to include some sort of licensing info up front.
My 2 cents anyway...
That's just KDE with a fugly skin, you know. Just look at the KDE Control Center. See the "apply settings on KDE startup" checkbox?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
USB is pretty fundamental, I hope it was just a typo. I would consider buying one of these as long as it includes at least one USB port.
Something else that looked strange: Linare said it will ship "more than 1000 notebooks" to Walmart stores in the US.
We are talking about all of the USA. Doesn't 1000 seem like a rather small number? That is NOT a real Walmart level shipment of product. What is that all about? (Considering the margins are small on this thing, the total profit on that volume would probably not even buy a street legal used car here in the USA.) They might as well have said they will ship more than a dozen notebooks.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Some say it's not powerful enough for today's standards, and aside from the RAM, I agree. Boost it to 256, and it's plenty. I'm typing this on a Sotec (now Averatec) 3120X laptop, purchased from a Wal-Mart (employee discount... I know, I suck, but it was $720 instead of $998), Celeron 1.2Ghz, 256M, 20G HD, and a DVD/CDRW. No legacy ports, just 3 USB, a winmodem (I'm told there are drivers, but never needed them), ethernet and 1 PCMCIA slot. Operating system is Gentoo, 100% MS Free. The only thing that is slow is compiling from source...
Now for gaming, my laptop and these machines are not good, but for a student who needs OpenOffice and net, or someone who wants mobility away from their gaming desktop... why not?
The box said "Requires Windows XP or better"... so I installed Ubuntu!
For a simple machine that would allow me to do some basic development work at a local coffee shop this thing could work out nicely.
I like my desktops, and have stayed there so far, but something like this could almost convince me to try my hands at a mobile work/hobby environment. Hell, the lack of wireless would not only make it more secure, but less of a distraction than my laptop usually proves to be.
Whether or not I get one, there is plenty of reason to believe this machine is a good thing, much as the $100 PC Projects that have been touted by several groups as the next great humanitarian effort and have been reported here on here on Slashdot.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
I wonder about a notebook priced for students that many universities wouldn't permit on their networks - not being XPpro. Now I'm sure many of you will say I'm crazy but I know for example that the UNC will not, with rare exceptions, permit a non XPpro machine in. They sniff you and if they find noncompliance they shut off the port.
Moreover does it have at least wireless drivers built in? Retrofitting Linux drivers into a notebook machine for a PCCard NIC is not a pretty sight even for well known distros that support it. And if I can't at least use wireless at home then a notebook is largely useless to me.
It's really $600 for a 256MB RAM unit.
Last but not least how does this compare with a more mainstream refurbished notebook machine? This unit is a little on the low end side and compares with maybe a 2-3 year old maintstream unit.
What they do seem to do rather effectively, is fuel price races to the bottom in every field they enter. This can't be good for any community. I would rather pay a few dollars more to buy a product from a local business, or a local geek to provide the same product or service.
http://injoke.org/index.php?title=daily_show_wal_m art_piece
http//injoke.org -- Culling The Interesting
Considering that Mr. and Mrs. Mainstream do indeed shop at WalMart, I hope the same.
I've seen MANY un-PC-edumacated people kicking away on Windows boxes that never changed the default wallpaper. The Linare puke-green-flem-ball pic wouldn't (L)inspire me to even WANT to use that PC.
Anyhews, I hope this goes over well regardless. Seeing more and more cheap boxes with Linux preinstalled is DoublePlusGood, right?
Over two years ago I bought a Toshiba laptop at Best Buy:
14 inch LCD
DVD drive
56k modem
10/100 ethernet
2 pcmcia slots
ATI radeon (works fine with linux opengl drivers) 256 megs ram (I upgraded to 512)
1.5ghz PIV
Windows XP Home (formated it and installed Debian
3 usb (version 1 not 2 unfortunatly) ports.
The only thing that sucked was the soundcard/speakers and the Microsoft tax. It only cost $600. Acording to moore's law (I know technecally it's about density, not price or performance) that kind of computer should be down to $300 by now (half price at the 18 month mark, and I give it a little extra leway.) Other machines have gone WAY down in price. I just bought a sun machine:
2 gig ram
4 way SMP (450mhz each)
4 redundant power supplies
It cost me $200 and runs solaris 10 great. It would have cost me at least $2,000 two years ago. Why is PC hardware, particularly laptops, still so expensive? On the high end the specs are going up so the price/performance ratio is higher, but at the low end, things have stagnated or even gotten more expensive. Cheap laptops cost more now then they did years ago. New SD-RAM is more expensive then it used to be and often more expensive then faster DDR RAM. CPU performance has also grown slowly in the low end dispite the constant clockspeed increeses. It took the desktop over a decade since the technology was available (the mips R4000 came out in 1991) to go 64 bit.
Intel is certainly part of the problem in spite of their recent 180 on the mhz myth and adoption of AMD64 for the Xeon. I have a pentium II 450mhz system with 512k L2 cache, and a PA-RISC system with 1.5meg L1 cache. I even have an ancient sgi Indy with a 200mhz mips processor with 1meg cache. Why do new Celerons still only have 256k L2 cache and PIVs only have 1meg L2 cache? Up to about 2 megs you will still get significant performance increeses by adding more cache. I understand the Itanium2 has a 9meg on chip L3 cache, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons its price/performance ratio stucks ass. However, there is a happy medium between the PIV and Itanium when it commed to cache. AMD is in the same boat with a 1meg L2 on the Athlon64.
Microsoft is part of the problem, but this certainly isn't the case for this walmart computer. It might be a step in the right direction, but the industry can produce better desktops and laptops cheaper.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
If Wal-Mart.com's return policy is the same as its stores, it doesn't hold a candle to Costco's.
It takes a gutsy business to promise to refund almost everything it sells, in any condition, ever, in cash (even if you pay with a credit card, as I usually do). They've made a lot of money from me because of it.