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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."
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.
Run Windows ?
can it copy and paste Miami Vice images?
After I saw "Linare", I asked myself the same thing.
(seriously)
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.
I had a friend that worked in the rent-to-own business. He was in collections, but the place was small enough that he could also find himself on the floor from time to time.
It didn't matter what the specs were. All the customers cared about was web (pr0n and music) and email, with a minority interested in chat.
These machines, running linux satisfy all the needs of this customer, provided they can come up with $500 all at once.
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
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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
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.
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
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