Wal-Mart to Offer Components for DIY Computers

FearTheFrail writes "Reuters reports that Wal-Mart is preparing to put "build your own computer counters" in 1200 of its 3200 stores, with plans to do so in at least 1400 by the end of the year. Maybe this will bring on an influx of new hardware enthusiasts, along with plenty of horror stories about attempted computer assembly. Do you think this will have an effect on the OEM parts market? And what about the operating systems to be offered? Will Wal-Mart shoppers migrate to Linux in order to save a hundred bucks or more, or will they even have the chance?"

Comments

Re:I don't get it

[vtcodger]

***Why wouldn't Wal-Mart customers "have a chance" to install Linux? Do they connect to a different internet than everyone else? Are they banned from entering computer and book stores?***

Reason 1 -- WalMart may not want most customers using Linux because Linux hardware support and detection still is somewhere between Windows 95 and Windows 98 in terms of maturity. That's not all that good. Poor Plug and Play means returns and that costs money. Maybe, if they make it clear that they do not support equipment not purchased from WalMart, they can offer a Linux distribution that is tested with the hardware they sell.

My last experience with Installing Linux -- Slackware 10.2

• The display, mouse, and keyboard actually installed and worked right without tweaking(The second time this has happened. Progress IS being made).
• BUT
  • NIC (an NE2000 clone) wasn't detected and had to be insmodded
  • HP 3670 Scanner not supported
  • INTEL QX3 microscope detected, but the option to control the lights doesn't work. And when I finally got around to installing Web camera software to use the imaging, that doesn't work either.
  • Sound Card -- detected and makes noises, but they aren't remotely the right noises.
  • CUPS -- The network aspects work, but would surely be impossible for a non-geek to configure. Of more importance to me, it generates a garbled PCL header that causes my HP-IIP to demand A4 paper. However, the printout is truncated to A4 size (unusable), not scaled to A4 size (which would be not quite as bad).. And, BTW, this whole idea of using HTTP to configure things really needs more work before it is turned loose on unsupecting users. e.g. turn page caching of the configuration pages OFF dammit.
  • SAMBA -- I got it running without a lot of trouble, but I think a non-geek would probably be in real trouble.
  • I somehow ended up with a 4mb swap file. This produced a truly spectacular swapping storm when I installed KDE and started up a few tasks. This particular problem may have been self inflicted in some fashion that a non-geek wouldn't blunder into.
  • I was able to detect, mount, and use USB flash memory pen drives, but the process wasn't even remotely a Windows plug and play experience.

IMO **ANY** of the above except maybe the Intel QX3 which is a discontinued product that a non-geek probably wouldn't expect to work would be enough to think twice about selling non-geeks Linux over the counter.

Reason 2 -- Boxed software products like TaxCut, games, mapping programs often won't run on Linux even if it has WINE. Explaining to customers why not would be painful and many wouldn't understand. Why ask for pain?

I'm not against selling Linux to non-geeks, but I think that the right place to start is single purpose machines -- e.g. A real cheap web browsing PC with a bundled printer.