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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."
(it's a joke :) )
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
its fine, especially for a web user period. or a basic word processor. or maybe even for music...
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
Balance 14.1" Laptop, 1.1 GHz AMD Athlon 4
Remove windows and you got your self a sub $500.
It still doesn't make them the good guys. I shudder to think what part of the world they are monopolizing for cheap labor...
It's Wal-Mart -- desecrator of burial grounds, disturber of ancient ruins, discriminator of women employees, and destroyer of small-town America... ...but it's Linux!
Oh, how to feel?
The coolest voice ever.
That's better specs than my laptop. Maybe it's time for an upgrade.
Run Windows ?
can it copy and paste Miami Vice images?
If you want a laptop, you usually want to use it for work, you know, to have a mobile computer away from your main desktop.
Now, most people use Windows or Mac for their primary desktop. Hardly any users that buy their computers at Walmart are running Linux on their main machine. So what are they going to do with this laptop? It's not really compatible with their standard machine.
My best guess is that the hardware is basic enough that they can probably install Win98 on it with very little trouble. This is a computer for software license violaters, in that case.
Seriously Bentonville, put these super-cheap machines in the stores. Not because they will fail to create a train wreck. I've been in your stores - talked to you people - I know it will be a train wreck. Bring these items to your stores for me. Bring them to the store so I can see Linux move into mainstream big box retail. Bring them into the store because that will drive some interesting competition.
Thank you.
Absolutely no mention of warranty for the boxes at the Linare website. I'd be a little worried about buying a low-end unit from a foreign company, through Wal-Mart, without some kind of assurance I could get it serviced somewhere reasonably.
I worry that the money saved might be done so foolishly.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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.
Why did they choose linaire, the world's most hideous linux distribution?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I don't think Walmart is doing this for any other reason then they don't want to pay the sticker price for windows. They are not really advocating Linux, more so than just providing something so they can say it has an operating system. Sadly, for any of you who thinks this is a win for Linux... I feel most certain that most of they buyers of these machines will buy it not because of Linux but because of it's fairly low price... wipe the hard drive... and install the pirated copy of Windows they got from the kid next door.
Blender And Linux Fan
"No employees died to release this product m'lord"
"Ah, yes, well kill a few employees anyway."
Dell did this for a while. 128 with a raging fast P4 was the norm for their advertised specs for years. I guess their marketing department was banking on the fact that a fast CPU helps when the operating system alone uses all the ram and you're into virtual memory the moment you run an application. People on Slashdot understand the need for just enough ram, but most consumers only know what Intel marketing tells them.
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.
what's the point of typing out byte? isn't a capital B assumed to be byte whereas a lowercase b is assumed to be bit?
if you're going to write out Byte, you might as well write out Mega as well. but mixing and matching like this? i find the flagrant lack of consistency to be unsettling.
THE STICK UP MY ASS IS TWITCHING AND I DEMAND A CORRECTION!
1 x IEEE 1394 port, 1 x PCMCIA Slot (TypeII) , 1 x LAN Jack (RJ-45) , 1 x Headphone /Speaker-out, 1 x MIC-in
1 x External VGA port, 1 x Modem Jack (RJ-11), 1 x Built-in MIC
Did they forget to list it, or do they really think a notebook without a USB port would actually sell?
I dig on Linux and all (got Slack 10 running right now), but I figured out early on that the Microsoft tax isn't that big a deal to the OEMs. Plus, and OEM has the luxury of punting their problems customers to Microsoft tech support (which is by far the biggest reason you're not gonna see Dell pushing Linux on the desktop for the masses anytime soon). The problem here is I can get a much better (numbers wise, I won't argue reality) notebook from Dell for ~$200 more. Call me when it's $300, maybe $350.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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...
It's probably more Walmart's doing than the manufacturer. Walmart will have said "give us a laptop we can sell below the $500 price point or someone else will." So the manufacturer has to cut costs somewhere. Not that I disagree, 128MB is too little, but you gets what you pays for.
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.
A crafty one. Have you priced memory upgrades? At Dell they are almost twice what a little online searching can get you, same model same manufacturer.
There's money in under specing a system then overcharging for upgrades.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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 initially thought that it didn't look so bad, but then it became painfully obvious it was just trying to be like Windows, down to the logoff/shutdown/restart screen. When I scrolled down and saw that in the place of the start menu was a hideous looking button labeled "explore" I had just about enough. Just about every desktop environment for *nix has good traits. It is almost an insult to the developers to theme it like a "me-too" windows clone.
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.
In economic theory a commodity is something which has many producers and many buyers. The other defining characteristic is that one producer's goods are not much different than any other producer's. Commodities usually have quite low margins because it doesn't matter who you buy them from so you can shop for the lowest price.
The things that make laptops expensive are no longer as special as they were a short while ago. 15" LCDs are now a couple of hundred bucks. Run of the mill hard drives are becoming smaller and smaller. NiMH batteries are quite good and are much cheaper than more exotic types. The result is that laptops should be not a lot more expensive than desktops in the near future.
When IBM sold their laptop operation it was because they saw the writing on the wall. We're beginning to see lots of small companies producing laptops. We aren't quite at the point of being able to assemble your own laptop from parts but we're getting close. Desktops have been a commodity for a long time; laptops soon will be.
Imagine someone having several computers in their home. Maybe one of these laptops could be used as a relatively cheap file/backup/mail server. Throw in a PCMCIA card and you may even use it as a gateway or firewall.
The reason I say it's cheap, by the way, is the form factor. Naturally a desktop system with similar or better specs would be even cheaper. But this seems to me it's cheaper than other alternatives with comparable form factors. You could configure this laptop to run with the lid closed and that gives you a relatively sleek box which also draws little power.
The revolution will not be televised.
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
What would call "1 x IEEE 1394 port"? Umm... Oh yeah, FireWire. :)
:)
And it would be truly amazing to have a FireWire port, and no USB ports. Though what's truly disappointing is no built-in wireless. I worry about PC Card wireless adapters getting snapped off, and if there's no USB... And really, the whole point of a laptop these days is wireless.
Feh, oh well, for less than $500 maybe it's worth it. Then again...
Seriously. This is just a way for Wal-Mart to eliminate more competition - Dell, Gateway, HP, et. al, and 'embrace and extend' another market.
Wal-Mart isn't saving you money. Spend a little more and buy a used Powerbook, or a stripped-down Dell.
The less people that shop and buy at Wal-Mart, the better off this whole country will be.
By looking at this thing, I'm guessing that 75% of the people buying this will return it once they use it and realize that it isn't Windows. It looks very much like Windows, plus most people who shop at Wal-Mart wouldn't know the difference.
This machine is obviously geared toward getting Linux "Out there" to people who are Lin-curious but not confident enough to fly solo on their primary PC, and also I suspect Wal-Mart is trying to reach the power-user market by offering a machine without the costs of Windows involved.
This is all well and good. If you have $500 to burn and want to experiment with a proprietary version of Linux, this is your bag. For the rest of us, I'd suggest visiting your friendly garage sale or used computer depot for a good solid 750mhz PC to throw Fedora on for grandma and grandpa who are Lin-curious. Power Users that don't want to give Microsoft their share of PC sales cash have options. Build your own machine even.
So this leaves this option kind of in the air. The only reason I would see to buy it, would be to get a fully functional system, format, and install Gentoo.
Nice try, but not quite home-calibur Linux <b>yet</b>.
Let's fake an answer for the curious; let's fake it all for the fame.
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.
Change KDE to Blackbox or any other *box and it'll be fine. Turn off unneeded services as well.
I run Window Maker. It uses 800kB of RAM (this is why a pixmap-only theme, the default config uses 300kB). I used to have a 166Mhz Pentium box with 48M of RAM (96M swap) and it was Window Maker + Konqueror (2.something) + Gaim + xchat + emacs fine. Mozilla wasn't touchable (then again, there was no Firefox at the time and M17 was sloooowwww). Compile times were slow but reasonable for a system of its speed. Things sped up a bit when I made the background a solid color instead of a pixmap (and used a non-pixmap theme in Window Maker).
If you run a smallish window manager and have at least 48M of RAM (one of the 16M SIMMs went bad so I had to swap memory around and ended up at only 32M after convincing my friend that his Indy didn't need RAM and then it wasn't usable) everything will run fine. OO.o will be basically unusable (at least 641b was, it's certainly better now since 641b is ancient) but KOffice and Applixware Office (yeah, remember that? It was $30 and kind of worth it...SHELF is neat little programming language at least) run great. Eventually I was able to snatch some PC66 for free and got up to 64M with a blazingly fast (note that this was 2001ish so you should laugh) K6/233Mhz and the system was very usable.
I actually ran Quake 3 at around 25fps @ 640x480x16 after I replaced the TrioV64+ with a Voodoo3. Team Arena and Solider of Fortune weren't really playable though. Heretic II got above 40fps and I wasted way too much time on that (This was when Loki games were going for $10 a pop at EBGames). Sim City 3k didn't run well at all, even with 64M (funny how the one 2D game needed more RAM than the 3d ones...).
The point is, 128M of RAM is a lot. Not when you are running KDE 3 or GNOME 2 on it, but if you stick to running Window Maker (or Fluxbox, IceWM, XFCE, etc.) and using Konqueror or Mozilla (or Galeon or Firefox) it will work fine. OO.o might not be too happy but KOffice works fine unless you need to do super heavy duty word processing. You might be surprised at how well KDE/GNOME apps run when you aren't running the entire desktop environment.
If it weren't Walmart (which I refuse to shop at for ethical reasons, they are an evil evil company) I'd be tempted to buy one of these and throw Debian onto it.
Note that I still run Window Maker even though I have a dual AthlonMP 2800+ system with a gig of RAM :-)
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Just to clarify, Open Office(tm) is a trademark of some company somewhere in commercial land. The software most of you use is OpenOffice.org(tm). Please refer to it as such.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I have no idea how I typed "Atlon" not just once, but twice. I should have known better. Sorry.
But they don't offer a linux laptop WITH WIRELESS. When they do that, it'll be something worth discussing.
Actually they do for $100 more. And you get 256MB of RAM instead of 128MB.
If you read their website they state that it will be for sale not only at walmart but at their own site and amazon.com, also if you cared to even look at the site a little more you would notice they have two models, one cost $500 and i agree it is shity but the $600 comes with 256mb of ram wifi, a dvd drive, and they state that their cpu's they use are althlon xp-m so it cant have that bad of a battery life. But like many of you said it does not state that there are any usb ports, I have contacted their site and am going to see if they respond, I just hope i dont get an automated response.
Just because they're dumb as boards, think Jesus is looking through their rooftops, favor TV shows about eating live worms, and buy and vote themselves into a lower economic class is no reason to condescend to them!
Unfortunately The question is whether people want to pay thrice the competitors' price for clothing made here in the US or any where else with well compensated workers. No I don't work for American Aparel but their ads caught my attention a while back. I was dismayed they did not do online shopping but that has since changed.
As for the topic at hand, the moral disadvantages of buying an especially cheap computer are perhaps counter-balanced by the environmental advantages of buying a small form factor machine?
And they'd better have IE on there.
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I work for a college's tech services department. We require Windows users to run a CD that includes Symantec AV and Checkpoint VPN software to log into the network.
Right now, for Mac and Linux users (as well as people with networked XBoxes, Playstations, ect), they just give us their IP and MAC addreses and we unblock their MAC address.
Our network security guys are for the most part unix geeks. They work pretty closely with the Linux community here, speaking at LUG's, ect. I would think many other schools would be the same way
I have blog like everyone else