$200 Linux PCs On Sale At Wal-Mart

Placid sends in a Wired blog entry on Wal-Mart's new sub-$200 Linux-based PC. Wired calls it "a custom distribution of Ubuntu Linux," and the AP identifies the distro as gOS, made by a small company in Los Angeles. Wal-Mart began selling Linux PCs in 2002 but they have been out of stock for a while. From the Wired blog: "It has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software. By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers."

Comments

A 1.5 GHz Via?!

[SlappyBastard]

Wow! Are we trying to convince people that Linux sucks?

Interesting

[stoolpigeon]

I saw this yesterday and was considering if it would as the next pc for my parents. I don't think so - for one reason, powerpoint. But my folks might be a little unusual with that requirement. I also wonder if my dad could sync his palm to it.
 
Then we'd need to make sure that their printers are going to work all right. And I'd probably need to teach them how to use new software for printing photos. The more I think about it, as much as I hate to say it, the less I think it would work.

Re:Interesting

[Silver Sloth]

Then we'd need to make sure that their printers are going to work all right. And I'd probably need to teach them how to use new software for printing photos. The more I think about it, as much as I hate to say it, the less I think it would work. As someone who got Vista with a new PC I can assure you these problems are not limited to *nix.

Re:Interesting

[Nibbler999]

There's a powerpoint equivalent (Presentation) in Open Office.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw this yesterday and was considering if it would as the next pc for my parents

An Ubuntu PC? Why do you hate your parents? What did they ever do to you?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

And why should I use OO if i can (and want to) pay for a MS 2007? Price is not everything. And ideologies suck.

Re:Interesting

[langelgjm]

Yeah, I've been thinking about a new machine for my parents for a while now, though this isn't much of an upgrade from what they currently have (though I'm sure it runs faster.) Then I saw this:

Even at the low end, however, image is everything. The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability.

I think it's silly, because I'd rather have desk space, but I have to admit my first thought was, "That's what SHE said!"

Re:Interesting

[wile_e_wonka]

There are Palm-syncing programs in Ubuntu. One I "gnow" of is gnome-pilot. I'm not sure whether it works in an enlightenment environment, but wouldn't be surprised if it does.

As for printing, I had to adjust no settings in Ubuntu 7.10 to print. It just worked.

Re:Interesting

[stoolpigeon]

Yeah - I bought my dad a new laptop this year and ordered it with xp.

Re:Interesting

[mhall119]

OpenOffice.org Impress can open and save .ppt files, so they will still be able to do that. There are also utilities to sync with palm devices, I hear they work pretty well now. Printers may be an issue, depending on the maker and quality of the printer. Printing photos can be done from the default image viewer (not Gimp), I don't see how that would be very difficult to teach.

Honestly, get a Ubuntu LiveCD, pop it into their current computer, and test drive it. I'm sure there will be a learning curve, but it shouldn't be too steep, certainly less steep than moving them to Vista or MS Office 2007.

Re:Interesting

[pentalive]

And "Ill use Microsoft regardless of it's price" is not an ideology of it's own?
This Anonymous Coward is Steve Balmer!!

Re:Interesting

[Albanach]

And ideologies suck.

Not nearly as much as monopolies.

If you can afford Office 2007 go ahead and buy it, but as already discussed, this machine isn't going to be very good at running windows, so you'll need a different PC too.

Be aware though, that as OpenOffice continues to develop and becomes more of a competitor, you as a MS user will benefit, through more money being spent on R&D to bring you new features, as MS try to maintain their lead, as well as lower costs as MS try remain competitive.

Without competition, you'll see MS continue to develop their software like they did between 1999 and 2006 where windows saw only an incremental improvement between Windows 2K and Windows XP and Office changed even less.

Re:Interesting

[Entropius]

And I'd probably need to teach them how to use new software for printing photos.

Why?

My mom uses GIMP or Picasa on Windows to print photos. How's this all that different from using GIMP or Picasa on Linux to print photos?

Re:Interesting

[encoderer]

You've got it wrong.. it's more like:

"And I'll use the BEST OFFICE SUITE regardless of it's price"

Say what you want, there is no viable competitor right now to Office. I've used Star Office before. I've used Google Docs.

Neither of these can yet (YET) hold a candle to Office.

But I'm all for choice, so I hope they both improve several orders of magnitude over the next few dev cycles.

Re:Interesting

[corvair2k1]

Even at the low end, however, image is everything. The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability.

That comment is actually quite inflammatory. I'd bet hard money that they never used the word "unsophisticated" when discussing why they made it large. However, the thought expressed by these "insophisticates" is generally true: You can generally fit weaker machines in smaller cases than more powerful machines. That's why there's still a market for the freaking huge Lian Li cases for power users... because some powerful gaming machines require freaking huge cases. And it's why the Mac Mini is in a small case while a Mac Pro is in a big one.

Re:Interesting

[BrokenHalo]

Another interesting thing is that these machines are being loaded with Enlightenment as a default "lightweight" environment. Time was (only 10 years ago) when Enlightenment was regarded as CPU and graphics-heavy and was only used as a window manager under Gnome (default option for RedHat 5.x and 6.x comes to mind). Just goes to show...

Re:Interesting

[dnormant]

But price is important; why put a $200 application package on a $200 computer?

Re:Interesting

[langelgjm]

Funny you should mention Lian Li cases... I happen to have one (a slightly older model of this one), and I think it's great, mainly from the standpoint of material quality, but also aesthetically. Cases have come a long way in the past few years, though - usually you don't need to worry about cutting yourself badly while trying to remove components. However, I think the best designed chassis I ever had the pleasure of owning was for a Power Mac 7500 with the Outrigger style case.

Re:Interesting

[glavenoid]

Gnome apps work fine in E, or any other window manager or DE, provided the library dependencies are met. The nice thing about Ubuntu is its package manager offers cross desktop compatibility - it will automagically install a subset of the development platform (in this case, Gnome) sufficient to run an application in a different desktop environment (such as Enlightenment). Therefore, it's not necessary to install Gnome just to run a few Gnome applications.

Re:Interesting

[walt-sjc]

Neither of these can yet (YET) hold a candle to Office.

I beg to differ.

So you would buy MS Office at $460 for a $200 PC? And of course that also needs a windows license for another $210 so you are up to $670 worth of software for a $200 PC. Then of course you would need the commercial equivalents for all the other software that comes with that machine which would probably run around a total of $2500+ for a $200 PC. Yeah - that makes a lot of sense for home users (the target market.)

Say what you will about Open (Star) Office but it handles 95% of the business documents I deal with perfectly on a daily basis. It should handle 99.999% of the home needs just fine. The only reason it can't handle the remaining 5% is due to Microsoft's refusal to fully document and release specifications to the MS Office file formats. It's not OK to support a company that illegally abuses it's monopoly status to damage competition.

Re:Interesting

[LWATCDR]

Open office does have a power point replacment. I don't think it as good as power point but it may be good enough.
Sync you dads palm. Yes you can.
Printers? Most HPs and Epsons work fine. Check Linux printing or try Ubuntu Live with your current printer.
Software for digital photos? Try FSpot. It is free and very good. Gimp is also a good program my wife loves it.
It may be less painful that you think.

Re:Interesting

[walt-sjc]

Office Pro, non-upgrade, runs around $460. Since you can't get an OEM copy for this machine, you will pay through the nose. Ain't monopoly business tactics fun? Ditto for the windows license you would also need to run MS Office.

Re:Interesting

[El Lobo]

Office for students cost 99 USD, and if your college /university has the Campus agreement, it costs USD 45. For me, as an uiversiy worker with the Select agreement, it cost USD 25. So I rathere pay (hell, even USD200 if needed) but I rather use MS office with all integration between it's parts than OO even if it's free.

Hey, but that's just me (and thousand of co-workers here), but please, feel free to use what you want. Only don't preach, please...

Re:Interesting

[Bobartig]

small cases ftw! My two main desktops are a mac mini (a little buddy for my tv), and a 20" iMac, who's effective case size is very small as well. obviously if you need 4 expansion cards, or multiple internal drives, the big case is great, but im loving my small compys.

Re:Interesting

[dintech]

The only thing that worries me here is that this will be a lot of consumers first experiences with Linux. Does this really demonstrate modern Linux in the best possible light? From a visual and usability point of view I can't help but think that the average consumer will be disappointed even in comparison to older MS operating systems. But then what do you want for $200?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice does a pretty decent job of displaying (and writing) PowerPoint files. Synching to a Palm is also supported, comes with KDE, if I recall properly.

And, I bought one of the original el-cheapo Walmart boxes (the ones that came with Lindows), wiped it and installed Debian. (Now running the Etch version of Debian.) It does all I want it to, I just threw in a little more memory (now at a whopping 256M!) Hogs like Netbeans and OpenOffice are slow swapping places - lots of paging - but it works just fine for me.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious how Word Perfect stacks up against MS Office or Open Office now.

Re:Interesting

[Nullav]

Are you kidding? About the only differences in size come from buying a nice video card instead of using onboard video or a low-profile card, and having more hard drives. Regardless, it's nice to have the room to expand and good airflow that come from having a needlessly large case.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Office probably needs as much or more RAM to run at a reasonable speed as this laptop is going to have to run the whole system. Face it, Open Office is a resource pig. I hope the laptop comes with a fast robust hard drive to handle all the swapping that's going to happen if it comes with OOo.

Re:Interesting

[oatworm]

As I'm sure you're already aware, OEM pricing is very different from full retail, plus it's not like he's going to need Office Professional (the one that would cost $460) just to get Powerpoint. Looking at MS's product matrix, he could get away with "Home & Student" and still get Powerpoint - that can be had from Newegg for $129, and includes Word, Office, Powerpoint, and OneNote. Compare to StarOffice, which is $70 - yes, you get most of the same functionality, but it's still not quite the same; the point, however, is that this is less than a third of the price you quoted.

Windows licensing, meanwhile, is not $210 for OEM licensing. A NewEgg search reveals that you can get OEM licensing in packs of three for roughly $410; that works out to under $140 per license. Obviously, mass-manufacturers of PCs get much more favorable licensing pricing than that, but, for the sake of argument, we'll say that the customer is paying $140. This is still $70 less than the number you pulled out.

So, at this point, we've spent no more than $270 in software. Is this $270 you don't have to spend if you get the WalMart Linux PC? Of course, but if the WalMart Linux PC doesn't fit your needs, $270 is a reasonable number, and certainly much more reasonable than the hyperbole-screaming $2500 you came up with on a whim.

DISCLAIMER: I run Ubuntu Linux on everything I have because it meets my needs and does so at a price point that I am quite content with (free!). I do think that, as far as Linux distros go, it's easily the most user-friendly one that I've ever run across, and would happily recommend it to anyone that has some basic technical acumen. That said, I do not run Ubuntu because of it's philosophy, nor do I do it because of any particular dislike of Microsoft's "monopoly practices". From where I'm sitting, Microsoft did precisely what Ubuntu is doing now - they offered a lower priced (compared to the competition of the time), mostly fully featured set of applications that met the needs of a vast majority of people. Think back to the late '80s - if you wanted a GUI, the only way it was going to happen was if you bought new hardware that was incompatible with your existing IBM hardware or if you paid through the nose for OS/2... until Windows 3.0 came out. Need a server operating system? No problem - your choices were Unix (required expensive hardware, had severe vendor lock-in at the time, licensing was atrociously expensive), Netware (a little better on all counts, but still pricey), or Windows NT (same interface as all your workstations and a little cheaper). If you're a 10 person operation, guess which one you're picking? Hey, it's 1994 and you need a small database. Microsoft Access costs $100. How much does everything else cost? Oh... I see. Access it is! How about an Internet browser? Remember when those weren't free-as-in-beer? How did they get free? That's right - Internet Explorer. Were any of those products perfect? Heck no. All of their products were functionally inferior to the competition - but they met the needs of 99% of the world and cost less than their competition. Sound familiar? What people seem to forget in their haste to hate Microsoft is that, for better or worse, they were better behaved than their competition of the time. Now, their time is passing, and look who's sneaking up on them...

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

So you would buy MS Office at $460 for a $200 PC? And of course that also needs a windows license for another $210 so you are up to $670 worth of software for a $200 PC. Then of course you would need the commercial equivalents for all the other software that comes with that machine which would probably run around a total of $2500+ for a $200 PC. Yeah - that makes a lot of sense for home users (the target market.)

Coming from the position of being a dedicated Linux/OO/FOSS user myself, and strongly anti-MS, I think such ridiculous figures do no service to the anti-MS cause. $210 for a Windows license? We're talking about someone buying a cheap machine with an OS preinstalled, which will be the OEM version at about $50.
And what on earth is all this other $2000 worth of software? You *know* that most major FOSS applications are available for Windows as well as Linux, so you can get largely equivalent software setup for the same price - $0.
Finally, MS-Office: MS Office home and student 2007 which includes Word, Excel and Powerpoint costs $149 from MS themselves, and $125 from Amazon. Nearly all home users have no use for the other items in the much more expensive premium MS office packages.
So we're probably talking maybe $200 of software for a $200 PC, not $2000+
That's *still* far too much. There is absolutely no need to wildly exagerate (unless you're an MS shill trying to make the anti-MS crowd look mendacious or stupid).

Re:Interesting

[lordofthechia]

Just a heads up. A moderately small case can also limit your video card choices. I didn't really think about it till I tried to fit a video card with a passive cooling system (just a large heatsink). On one of my small cases the power supply was right over where the video card went, so it could only fit a card that was right about the height of the pcb board. On another one the case wouldn't close with the video card in it.

Re:Interesting

[encoderer]

In addition to your pricing issues, which another poster has pointed out, I've gotta say that I'm highly surprised that only 5% of your "business documents" use/contain any VBA logic. In my pond, I see a MUCH higher ratio, probably close to 50:50. That right there is enough to completely write-off OOo & Star.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Powerpoint? Sounds like you need to synch your palm to his face!

I kid, I kid.

Re:Interesting

[phorm]

Powerpoint: OpenOffice Impress

Printers: Rarely have issues, although I did have problems with an HP1020 and the stock Debian driver(s)
Photo software: Picasa, digikam, etc

See as though I've gone through the above with my grandparents, I'd say linux works fairly well in this arena... although I'm not really sure about usig "enlightenment" as an environment for XP-centric users. KDE works nicely though, I have it running without issue for most stuff on a 700Mhz dell laptop with 256MB of RAM.

Re:Interesting

[gaffle]

equating the rate of change of software with the rate of 'improvement' is a silly

even if increased rate of change = increased features

just sayin'

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Internally, I have VBA on about 90% of my Excel files, but the only Word VBA is in templates for automatic addressing and the like.
Coming from or going to other offices, nearly 0% has any VBA in them, and frankly, I'd be afraid to run any macros that didn't originate with me.
It is trivially easy to port 90% of my VBA macros to Open Office, and I have done so. The hard part with macros is going back and forth between Open Office and MS Office (one way isn't bad, back and forth gets tedious).

Re:Interesting

[Metaphorically]

Sorry if this is OT but what kind of printer do you have that "just worked?" I've been looking (off and on) for a reasonably-priced inkjet that is known to have solid support for Linux and I haven't had any luck. I know that one of the Canons in my house can be made to work with some Japanese drivers but I'd rather have one where the company supports my use of the hardware I buy.

Re:Interesting

[Phroggy]

Then we'd need to make sure that their printers are going to work all right. You may have trouble with the other things you mentioned, but my experience with CUPS has been GREAT. Give it a try; you might be surprised.

Re:Interesting

[Metaphorically]

The lack of driver support for common inkjet printers in Linux. I don't print a lot but when I do I do it in Windows so that I can use all the printer's features. I wish it weren't so but wishing doesn't get me a glossy photo out of that nice shiny Canon inkjet.

Re:Interesting

[rHBa]

With 1.5Ghz/512MB/80GB this PC should suit most low end users.

One thing you COULDN'T do with this PC is buy anything from Walmarts own website

Re:Interesting

[JoshJ]

I'd suggest you pick up a HP. I've got a HP deskjet (I can look up the model when I get back to my computer- I'm in a computer lab at the moment) that works perfectly thanks to the HP linux printing stuff.
My parents had a lexmark I couldn't get to work on dapper- it would scan but not print.

Re:Interesting

[ishpeck]

I saw this yesterday and was considering if it would as the next pc for my parents. I don't think so - for one reason, powerpoint.

Well, since Google Docs now opens Powerpoint files, I don't think there's much of a disincentive there.

Re:Interesting

[netglen]

How many parents out there really need PowerPoint for god sakes? I'm guessing that 99.9% of the parents out there want a computer for;

* Online Shopping
* Email to distant relatives and family.
* News
* Viewing and printing family photos.
* Basic word processing

Re:Interesting

[lekikui]

I'd say that Enlightenment should be fine for such things. It tends to be fast and shiny, and doesn't use much processing power.

As for the rest of the device, I can't think of a way to beat it for $200. Heck, I might get one and put a real distro on it.

Re:Interesting

[xappax]

feel free to use what you want. Only don't preach, please...

This comes up a lot, this idea of "preaching". How is advising - even demanding - people to make ethical decisions "preaching"? Simply put: Technical superiority and cost aren't the only considerations that should be made when you decide which product to purchase and use.

Microsoft is an unethical business. They use monopolistic practices to distort the market to their advantage, and they lobby for and exploit restrictive laws to prevent threatening innovation in software development. Because they are such a huge business, the impact and severity of this behavior is similarly huge. It's very important as an ethical human being not to give them money or other forms of support, because if you do, you're actively aiding in their activities which harm the rest of us.

It seems to me "don't preach" is a slightly obfuscated way of saying "Don't tell me what to do". Nobody here can make you do anything, but that doesn't give you an excuse to do whatever you like, without regard to ethical considerations. And offering advice and commentary on what seems like an unethical action is far from preaching, unless "offering an analysis which takes into consideration right and wrong" falls under your definition of preaching.

Re:Interesting

[Intron]

See the compatibility list. Some are fully supported (like Brother) and some not at all (like QMS). I had no problems with the Canon ink jet that I had. I use Epson now.

Re:Interesting

[AJWM]

One thing you COULDN'T do with this PC is buy anything from Walmarts own website

There's a huge difference between "anything" and "video download service". The article you link to complains about Walmart's video download service not working with anything but IE. The rest of Walmart's website works just fine with Firefox on Linux.

Irony works better when it's factual.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why there's still a market for the freaking huge Lian Li cases for power users... because some powerful gaming machines require freaking huge cases. And it's why the Mac Mini is in a small case while a Mac Pro is in a big one. No...they don't. The bigger towers are only useful for more drives.

Lian Li is selling more and more small cases with room for 2 optical drives (who the hell needs 5? running a DVD factory with your gaming PC?), no floppy (that's what USB/CD boot is for), and 5 or so PCI-E slots (the stuff that makes gaming PCs: graphics cards and sound cards). As long as it can fit 2-4 HDDs for RAID, a powerful graphics card, a standard-sized power supply, and a tower CPU cooler or water cooling, it's big enough for a powerful gaming machine. Like my Lian Li.

Re:Interesting

[vivtho]

Virtually all HP printers are supported out of the box under Ubuntu.
I was running Ubuntu 6.06 and it flawlessly detected my HP MFP. The only gripe I had was that the default drivers did not offer the advanced features of the Windows drivers.
That problem was easily fixed within 10 minutes of browsing the Ubuntu forums. Newer HP printers also provide a direct link to the Linux drivers on their support site.

Re:Interesting

[bkr1_2k]

Which is exactly what the grandparent said. "Except for buying a nice video card"...

Re:Interesting

[h4rm0ny]

Yeah - I bought my dad a new laptop this year and ordered it with xp.

I think the whole world is doing what you're doing. I'd thought that it was just snobby techies like myself that were turning their noses up at Vista, but it looks like this is a real market force. I saw this a couple of days ago (second paragraph) and laughed like crazy. "Downgrade to Windows XP for £40.00 extra." Priceless (and I bet it's popular too)!

Re:Interesting

[walt-sjc]

I'm sure you are ALSO aware that you can't USE an OEM license on this $200 linux machine without violating the OEM license. So your argument is moot.

Re:Interesting

[walt-sjc]

Um, not everyone is still a student or lives in the fantasy world of educational institutions.

Re:Interesting

[PhoenixOr]

How about he uses "*n?x"?

Re:Interesting

[qaldune]

Sometimes in life, what seems to be cheap, happens to be expensive.

Re:Interesting

[plague3106]

Wow.. again with the price lies here. You can get office for $130, and windows xp for $78 ($93.50 for Vista). So you're $670 is now down to $208.

Its debatable whether or not the "other" software is even something needed; certainly the OP was only talking about office anyway.

Re:Interesting

[plague3106]

Kind of a non issue isn't it? Do you not spend more in DVDs than you did for the player? Do you stop buying games for your gamecube when you've spent as much as the gamecube?

That's just a silly question.

Re:Interesting

[dnormant]

It's times like this that I wish I could've kept a moderation point in my back pocket. Bravo.

Re:Interesting

[mr_mischief]

AbiWord and Gnumeric are pretty cool if you don't need good interoperability with Office. There are WordPerfect for Linux versions, too, and IIRC those do a pretty good job with most Office documents.

Really, the Office document argument for a home machine bothers me anyway. How often must someone get an Office document at home and edit it, then sen it back out as an Office document? If you're generating your own documents, you can always send RTF or CSV to people who really need to use them in Office. Most of the time home documents are for use within the home.

Re:Interesting

[mccabem]

(Trying not to repeat others' comments in mine...)

I know you're self-branding as a Ubunutu user, but I will say you have an unfairly (IMO) apologetic opinion of Microsoft in these regards.

I'm not aware of Microsoft's solutions ever being regarded as inexpensive, except by those who've historically acquired their Microsoft wares by way of sneakery. You know what I mean!! ;-) (Not accusing you - I'm talking about every old school Windows "user" I've known.)

Just a few things:
Their dominance came wholy on the coat tails of IBM's monopoly (by virtue of IBM's brainwashed userbase) pure and simple.

The userbase keeping their hardware for those reasons was surely misguided given the relative quality of what else was available -- if it was bad enough to need Microsoft, then replacement could have been as good an option. (No, keep that hardware at any price!)

Going GUI (which they did on another vendor's platform - not their own) was one of the few innovations they offered back then and it wasn't even a feature of their OS.

"Paying thru the nose" for OS/2 (on a new PC) was largely a factor of being forced to **also** pay for Windows whether you wanted it or not. (This is the reason I never got a PC.....Windows 3.1 wasn't worth paying for and there was no reasonable option to not get it.)

Re:Interesting

[pluther]

You've got it wrong.. it's more like:

"And I'll use the BEST OFFICE SUITE regardless of it's price"

I think you may find, though, that people for whom money is no object are not the primary market for a $200 PC from Wal-Mart.

Re:Interesting

[the_B0fh]

I know you said inkjet, but, I my brother 5250DN. duplex printing, speedy, postscript, network ready, and you can find it for ~$200.

Re:Interesting

[cycoj]

They are using e17, which is still in development. IMO this outshine anything you get with gnome or kde unless you have compiz installed (not viable on these specs). Have a look over at www.enlightenment.org or www.get-e.org. What they've done is quite amazing. Lots of eyecandy without resource hogging.

Re:Interesting

[Zalbik]

I'm sure you are ALSO aware that you can't USE an OEM license on this $200 linux machine without violating the OEM license. So your argument is moot.

Why do you think you can't use an OEM license? Reference please...

A vista OEM license can be installed by anyone capable of doing so on any one machine. The license cannot be reactivated on any other machine, but you are not violating the license by the initial install. As well, OEM licenses do NOT provide you with Microsoft support...

See here for info: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070130-8730.html

And can you please detail what the approx $2500 worth of software that you get for free with Ubuntu is? I've just started playing around with Ubuntu...I must have missed some installation options...

Re:Interesting

[zullnero]

You "should" be able to sync your dad's Palm with it using jpilot, unless the OS doesn't support it. I don't know anything about this customized Ubuntu gOS build, however. I normally use gnome-pilot or kpilot, depending on the desktop manager. I don't know offhand what Enlightenment uses for sure other than jpilot.

As for the powerpoint deal, you're out of luck unless you can make them use that Google Preso thing, unless you can get them to learn to use OpenOffice Impress. Then again, there's a lot of learning and configuration in order to save a couple hundred bucks, and even then, I'm highly suspicious of how up to date this gOS deal is. If they've been wanking around with the usb settings, then it could end up costing you more time just getting your Palm to sync than it would be just to get a cheap Dell or something.

Re:Interesting

[the_B0fh]

The problem isn't what *YOU* pay for it. The problem is what the average user pays for it. And the bigger problem is what we, as a society, pay, when everything we do is owned by one single monopoly.

Re:Interesting

[lordofthechia]

He was talking about cases that accommodated half height cards. Even some of the cases that accommodate full height cards may inhibit the use of a card with a slightly overisized cooling mechanism. This is the reason I mentioned my experience.

Re:Interesting

[DragonWriter]

However, the thought expressed by these "insophisticates" is generally true: You can generally fit weaker machines in smaller cases than more powerful machines.

Yes, the upper bound on the power of the computer that could be in a large case is greater than the upper bound on the power of a computer that could be in a smaller case.

However, using identical internal components, a larger case will generally have little to no effect on computer quality*, so using a larger case to suggest greater power can be a deceptive marketing tactic (the same thing was done with computer software packaging back when more polished software came with more complete manuals, etc. -- software that was just a couple of disks with an install card would be sold in a box big enough to hold that plus a 500 page manual, to suggest that it was a more complete package.) It's particularly perversely deceptive when the machine is marketed as being particularly "green".

That's why there's still a market for the freaking huge Lian Li cases for power users... because some powerful gaming machines require freaking huge cases.

Yes, very powerful machines require big cases. But a big case doesn't make the components in a low-power machine more powerful.

And it's why the Mac Mini is in a small case while a Mac Pro is in a big one.

Yes, but this is like a Mac Mini in a Mac Pro case.

*there are certainly situations where it may matter, such as if the smaller case restricts cooling, or prevents standard-sized expansion cards, drives, or other in-case accessories from being added.

Re:Interesting

[sumdumass]

You will have to do all that when you go from XP to vista and maybe some of the Printer issues when going from XP to a higher XP service pack level.

If your not willing to do it with this, I don't see why you would be willing to do it with others within the MS family. And yes, SP2 for XP did break a few printers.

Re:Interesting

[sumdumass]

One question I have is Can you as much with enlightenment as you can with KDE or Gnome. I mean does it carry some of the libraries some programs insist on for their graphical display? Or will they need to be added in separately when installing the programs?

I forget which ones I have had problems with in the past. but I do remember there was some and don't believe they have gone away.

Re:Interesting

[sumdumass]

You can get OEM and upgrade versions at those lowered prices. OEM versions are supposed to be sold with a major component purchase if you abide by the licensing. Upgrades require a qualifying product Y that has to be added to the costs because it is useless if you don't have it.

So to go back with the example, you buy a $200 computer from wallmart, either some additional major component X that you are going to install plus the windows and office programs at the discounted price or you will go with retail versions. You prices would be either full retail price of $670 or your costs plus either X or Y which in both cases will not equal $208. However much extra in costs is dependent on component X or qualifying upgrade Y.

And yes, we must abide by the licensing requirements when comparing price unless someone is willing to stipulate Cost is with implied theft.

Re:Interesting

[sumdumass]

Lol.. It really depends on what it is being used for and how much power they want out of it. The on board sound and network aren't as good as some of the quality add on cards as well as they use system memory and CPU cycles. So if you looking for every last bit of performance is what you want, then a large case able to support add on cards like sound, network, a real serial modem and so on is the way to go.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

How about an Internet browser? Remember when those weren't free-as-in-beer? How did they get free? That's right - Internet Explorer. Point taken, but this detail is simply inaccurate. I don't remember paying for lynx, or mosaic, or any other browser, ever.

Re:Interesting

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

This comes up a lot, this idea of "preaching". How is advising - even demanding - people to make ethical decisions "preaching"?

That's the definition of preaching, you are just showing why it was correct to preach in this instance.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you wouldn't be getting this Linux machine, numbnuts. You'd be getting an eMachine or some similar cheap piece o' shit box with the OEM XP pre-installed.

Re:Interesting

[JoshJ]

As an addendum: It's a deskjet 3847. Obviously there's probably a newer model on the market in this line, but there you go.

Re:Interesting

[oatworm]

I know you're self-branding as a Ubunutu user, but I will say you have an unfairly (IMO) apologetic opinion of Microsoft in these regards.

I use Ubuntu because it meets my needs at a price I'm happy with. Windows, either XP or Vista, really don't at this point for me. Ubuntu has plenty of free software that I can acquire with minimal hassle. You can usually get the same software for Windows, but you have to search for it, which means knowing what you want beforehand. Furthermore, I deal with Windows every day at work and, well, I'm tired of looking at it and dealing with its quirks. As for Vista... don't get me started. I'm learning it because I have to, but I'm certainly not enjoying it. Long story short, I don't really care about Microsoft's or Canonical's business ethics or philosophies - they're both in the business to make money. If they sell good products at reasonable prices, they'll do just fine. If they fail to sell good products or price unreasonably, they won't, at least eventually. Now that Linux is beginning to not only match Windows feature-for-feature (if not exceed it) but is actually becoming approachable to the common man, people's perception of the reasonableness of Windows pricing and Microsoft's increasingly draconian licensing schemes is becoming more negative.

I'm not aware of Microsoft's solutions ever being regarded as inexpensive, except by those who've historically acquired their Microsoft wares by way of sneakery. You know what I mean!! ;-) (Not accusing you - I'm talking about every old school Windows "user" I've known.)

It depends on what you're comparing against. MS-DOS vs DR-DOS/Novell DOS didn't look terribly favorable in MS's direction - that said, when most everyone is bundling your version of DOS and not the other guy's, well, you're going to win this one by default, as far as home consumers are concerned. Windows NT vs. most flavors of Unix at the time, however, is a very different story - compared to anything SCO or Sun were cranking out, Windows NT was not only affordable but actually ran on commodity hardware. Compared to NetWare, it was priced at about the same level but at least LOOKED like any old shmuck could administer it, which meant that businesses could start commoditizing IT workers. Even better than that, though, was that, with Windows NT, you could buy a truckload of machines from your neighborhood computer store and, without buying any additional software, get them to talk with your NT server - no Novell clients for you. Did it work as well? Who cares - it's cheap!

(Ironically, this is precisely the mindset that's starting to drive Linux's popularity - now that it looks like anyone can administer a Linux box, thanks to GNOME and KDE, I think you'll find a lot of people are going to start setting up cheap Linux servers in their offices.)

Just a few things: Their dominance came wholy on the coat tails of IBM's monopoly (by virtue of IBM's brainwashed userbase) pure and simple. The userbase keeping their hardware for those reasons was surely misguided given the relative quality of what else was available -- if it was bad enough to need Microsoft, then replacement could have been as good an option. (No, keep that hardware at any price!)

I wholeheartedly agree. If it weren't for the whole "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mantra, we'd probably all be running Macs or Amigas or some other system. Then again, what workstations would companies have initially used if not IBMs? For better or worse, IBM brought desktop computing to the business masses, which, in turn, drove home computing past the "neat toy" stage. I'm not sure any other brand at the time would've been as successful at doing that, nor that they would've done so as quickly. That's not to say that we wouldn't be here eventually, just that IBM may have accelerated things a few years. The best part is that IBM and IBM clones really weren't that affordable compared to the compet

Re:Interesting

[Kadoo]

This is the year of the linux destop then!

Re:Interesting

[couchslug]

"I saw this yesterday and was considering if it would as the next pc for my parents."

So are other people, who one may assume will install "free" 9x/ME/2K/XP.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

on the screenies, you can tell the desktop is trying to say something.

f - you tube
wikipedia - b - s

Re:Interesting

[jvin248]

There are open source Linux programs to do all of these tasks. Open Office has a powerpoint equivalent... in fact I gave a presentation at a Fortune 10 company today that was entirely produced on Linux/Open Office. While I haven't pursued it, apparently Evolution will sync a palm under Ubuntu. Also, I have retired parents who switched from Mac to Kubuntu Linux - painlessly. There is a large audience that will pick up the $200 computer knowing they have to learn the software - but they'd have to learn any of the software on an XP or Vista or MAC OS system if they paid more anyway. Most people don't have cutting edge requirements - they aren't playing the latest games, they don't need fancy window manager "eye-candy", and they don't have a need to brag that their OS is bigger than your OS. They just want to get a few things done at a good value. The big question I have is how soon will Wal-mart's inventory be depleted - the last time they tried selling in this market they found they ordered too few.

Re:Interesting

[ealar dlanvuli]

I saw this yesterday and was considering if it would as the next pc for my parents. I don't think so - for one reason, powerpoint. But my folks might be a little unusual with that requirement. I also wonder if my dad could sync his palm to it.

Then we'd need to make sure that their printers are going to work all right. And I'd probably need to teach them how to use new software for printing photos. The more I think about it, as much as I hate to say it, the less I think it would work. Seriously, how many times are we going to fall for this?

Stop modding "I thought about getting my parents this - but it doesn't have [insert MS technology here]" posts up.

Sean

Re:Interesting

[Bonobo_Unknown]

Enlightenment doesn't seem to have changed that much since I used it last in 1998... granted it was well ahead of it's time...

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft != Monopoly.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

... It should handle 99.999% of the home needs just fine. The only reason it can't handle the remaining 5% ...

'Rounding errors' in OO? 4.999% more features? Who knows.

Re:Interesting

[oliderid]

I tend to agree if you have time to reinstall a proper distribution.

I bought a low cost Acer PC (Power F6 or something) with Linux. I need an extra PC for development on linux.

The Linux distribution was a total joke. It was a Taiwanese (not turbolinux) distribution that I haven't seen before.

Then I downloaded Ubuntu and I tried to install it. New problem it couldn't find my HD (some SATA drivers issues). I had to tweak the system in order to make it works with...OpenSuse (because I couldn't do it with Ubuntu).

So beware that an installed Linux OS doesn't mean that installing a proper Distro will be painless.

Re:Interesting

[lekikui]

I'd be fairly certain, mostly from the size of the download for the OS, that they're carrying most of the Gnome libs at least, and probably a bunch of the KDE stuff.

E is a lot lighter in general though, and nice for it. (typed from E16)

Re:Interesting

[terdog1]

I agree!!! While trying to learn Linux I constantly struggled, but was always comforted knowing I could re-write the kernel...no thanks, just want to print, use my wi-fi, etc. not become a programmer.

Re:Interesting

[Virgil Tibbs]

you can do EVERYTHING with enlightenment that you can with KDE or GNOME (or _any_other_)
for instance you can even have programs like k3b, kopete and konqueror running along side gedit synaptic etc.
This is not an issue. it is *very* simple to install programs on ubuntu, and this is no different.
what programs you want to run these days is possible, what ever window manager you have running.
-you should try ubuntu!

(let me know if you need any help/support)

Re:Interesting

[sumdumass]

Thanks for the info. I think I will give one of these a try and maybe test drive enlightenment on some of my older slower boxes.

Actually, I run Mandriva and CentOS. I tried Ubuntu live CDs and found them lacking compared to Knoppix or Mandrake Move.. Of course it was version 5 something and 6 something so maybe improvements have come along since then.

I am usually using KDE on the desktop and don't really care for Gnome. But I have found that I like some of the programs Gnome supports native and saw that I needed to install libraries and such in order to get them working correctly. By default Madriva will install multiple desktops with a simple click durring install and after doing that, I have never had to worry about libraries in this regard again. However, I usually never use the Gone desktop unless someone wants to show me something in it. I have always been afraid of using other desktop managers for that specific reason but I will admit that it has been a few years since since I looked into anything other then running KDE. It might be that it is completely different comming from other desktop managers.

Re:Interesting

[sumdumass]

Great! Thanks for the info.

I have a few older slower machines and I guess I will start looking to see if enlightenment would give them a boost. Newer versions of KDE and I assume Gnome have swollen to a state that they are sluggish on older hardware. I also like the Wallmart PC and Think I might buy one or two for a car computer. Most Howto for Car computers use a VIA processor and this looks like it would cut the cost in half.

Re:Interesting

[llefler]

So are other people, who one may assume will install "free" 9x/ME/2K/XP.

Why assume that? I considered getting one for my mom, but she complained last weekend when I delivered the new ($90) laser printer I picked up a few weeks ago. "... you should be using your money for yourself ...."

But back around '94 I built her an OS/2 machine that she used for 10 years. She only gave it up because AOL quit releasing a Win16 version of their software. I then replaced it with a Compaq laptop with XP that didn't even last 3 years. (dead motherboard) I liked the OS/2 machine because I never worked on it once during that time. The same can't be said for the laptop.

I'd much rather spend $200 and get a low maintenance Linux machine than work on the hand-me-down Windows machine that she's going to be using instead. Anyone know how usable AOL's site is using Linux/broadband?

Re:Interesting

[ozone_sniffer]

Even at the low end, however, image is everything. The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability. I'm speechless.

Re:Interesting

[pentalive]

Microsoft pre-installed on 99.999% of all machines.

Looks like a duck.

Everyone demanding documents come in Microsoft Formats.

Quacks like a duck.

Microsoft can force the manufacture of hardware that is
unusable in another OS? (like windmodems and sometimes Wifi
cards and sometimes high end video cards)

Smells like a duck... It's A Duck!

Windows is a monopoly shut up.

Re:Interesting

[pentalive]

Ok,

"Ill use what I think is the BEST office suite at any price"

Still AC sounds like SB.

Re:Interesting

[willllllllllll]

Nicely put.

Re:Interesting

[cunamara]

How is advising - even demanding - people to make ethical decisions "preaching"?

That's pretty much the definition of preaching, dude. Check out a church some time.

Re:Interesting

[protobion]

There is only one problem. Ethics are a subjective matter - that change with time, place, society and so on. In that respect, ethical conformity is a very poor argument for or against performing any action. It's survival of the fittest, and ethics by themselves just don't cut it in this game - unless they provide a significant advantage to the group as a whole. This, is again, a matter of debate.

The only reason to use any software is if it does the job the individual wants it to do while being affordable to the said individual. If a user chooses a particular, in the long run they will bear the consequences or rewards of their judgment. Period.

In my view, Microsoft's failures have mainly been their _appearance_ as an abusive monopoly. Fitness demands that in the current environment of the world, they need to be discrete in whatever "underhanded" tactics they follow. Their failure to follow this premise, has caused a "ganging-up" effect on them by their competitors, who are no doubt doing-so because it is to their advantage.

Returning back the article, if a person wants to use a $200 PC and run $2500 worth of software on it, who are we to say that's stupid ? There are plenty of scenarios where that is the most efficient thing to do - for example, when gifting my grandfather a computer who writes text on a computer but has only ever managed to do that in MS Word. Even Wordpad feels alien to him. At his age, he doesn't give a rat's a*** about learning new stuff.

Re:Interesting

[Cannelloni]

If PowerPoint is the requirement, may I suggest Keynote? Much better. Your folks will be amazed.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw this yesterday and was considering if it would as the next pc for my parents. I don't think so - for one reason, powerpoint.

OpenOffice.org's Impress is a fully functional replacement for Powerpoint. I use OOImpress for all of the lectures I give. I frequently watch people lecturing with Powerpoint and I see them cursing the name of Gates as things malfunction mid-lecture. I don't find myself having problems like that with OOImpress, so it seems reasonable to conclude that it's more stable, consistent, and dependable.

Re:Interesting

[skreeech]

I stopped by gamecube games before I passed the cost of the console :(

It was a great mario kart box

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said, xappax.

One person's "preaching" is another's simple "giving advice based on some personal experience in the matter." Hey /.ers, feel free to "preach" to me as much as you like, and I'll feel free to accept or reject what you say based on the quality of your argument and my own knowledge and experience of the matter.

And while we're on the subject, yes, Microsoft's business practices are unethical, immoral, and unacceptable, at least to me. So I use Palm OS instead of Windows Mobile; Linux instead of Windows.

But I don't meant to sound preachy, you understand...

Re:Interesting

[xappax]

Ethics are a subjective matter - that change with time, place, society and so on. In that respect, ethical conformity is a very poor argument for or against performing any action. It's survival of the fittest, and ethics by themselves just don't cut it in this game - unless they provide a significant advantage to the group as a whole.

That's bordering on nihilism. Call me a wide-eyed idealist, but I think that some things are simply wrong regardless of what the majority/government/culture says. And I prefer to take responsibility for living according to what's right and wrong, rather than just doing what everyone else says is and isn't ok and rationalizing it with some pomo philosophical handwaving.

Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[ByOhTek]

From the article, it's Everex. I need to fix/replace my mail/web server, and that's actually a cost-effective option by the looks of it? Of course I'd replace the OS, as I have my own preferences (and it's probably easier than uninstalling X, even if I didn't).

also, my thoughts on one comment:

"It has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software. By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers."

I don't see why that would have an issue with either. Gnome should be fairly responsive with that setup, KDE would probably want more memory (at 1GB it'd probably be faster than Gnome on that hardware).

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[residieu]

I have Kubuntu (Ubunut KDE) running on a 600 Mhz pentium, and it's generally very responsive. It may have a little more memory than that (I seem to remember it having 700 MB when it was running Windows 98), and I don't use it much for audio/video, but it's quite enough for what it does.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Ginger Unicorn]

it is a bit of an odd remark. my pc is a 1ghz athlon with 512mb and that runs ubuntu feisty perfectly.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[morgan_greywolf]

My wife had a similar arrangement, and while Gnome was generally pretty responsive, memory hogging applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org were a bit slow and tended to slow down the overall desktop if they were running due to constant swapping. The same box is being used for other purposes and now runs XFCE via Xubuntu and it's never been more responsive. I chalk that up to XFCE's considerably lower memory footprint.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Waffle Iron]

The last I heard of Everex was in the mid 1980s when it was a player in the niche market of souped-up 80386 PCs. I assume that it was one of the countless companies that eventually went out of business and whose brand name was bought up by some Far East electronics OEM.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[MsGeek]

For about $100 more you can get one of these puppies with 1GB RAM. However, the catch is you get Windows Hasta La Vista Home Basic on it. Eew.

My first computer ever was an IBM PC 5-slot, aka the Model 5150. One of the first things I did was shove an Everex 1200bps modem in it. They've been around for at least 20 years.

I wonder what kind of RAM it takes? Then again, 512MB RAM is just fine for a NAS running Debian Etch, which is what I am seriously considering purposing this machine for.

Of course, I HATE freaking Sith*Mart. Supposedly this machine is in stock at one which is within easy walking distance of me, though. I think I might pay them a visit.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[ByOhTek]

For about $100 more you can get one of these puppies with 1GB RAM. However, the catch is you get Windows Hasta La Vista Home Basic on it. Eew.

Doesn't bother me. First boot would be Knoppics - backing up the drive onto my USB HD.
Second boot would be the FreeBSD 6.2 installer

But, given I could upgrade the memory for less, I wouldn't buy that one anyway. I could get a 1GB stick of Crucial or Kingston for under $50.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Anonymous Coward]

VIA processors are technically simpler, and consequently a lot slower than equivalently clocked Intel and AMD processors.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Chandon Seldon]

For about $100 more you can get one of these puppies with 1GB RAM. However, the catch is you get Windows Hasta La Vista Home Basic on it. Eew.

Spending $100 for a 512 meg RAM upgrade is just dumb - even with OEM Vista Home Basic. For $100 you should be swapping in 2 gigs or more.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[AvitarX]

They should really have used Ubuntu and XFCE.

I like Enlightenment, but it is VERY different than Windows, and not completely intuitive. For example the icon bar (like a task list) defaults to being able to go under things (in Ubuntu anyway). Also, no start button and no files on the desktop.

XFCE works very close to gnome or Windows and looks great. Stuff saves to the Desktop, it has a start button and a task bar. No autoflip on screen edge (by default) no multi-view ports (by default at least). Using enlightenment almost to me sounds like designed failure. I would think a slightly sluggish Gnome or KDE would give a better impression.

I also think the biggest thing would be a lighter-weight (than Firefox) but still highly site compatible (like Firefox) web browser would help. On my system (that uses Gnome) Firefox is the biggest memmorey hog. I also have a Celeron 3.4GHz with 512 MB of ram. I installed Xubuntu, but also some Gnome and KDE apps. Firefox is using 125MB of RAM. My SWAP is at 400MB used of 800MB. I am using XFCE and as long as no super Flash site comes up things run fairly well, though there is definite lag in the Google Apps, they are functional.

I like Enlightenment, but it is just too unixy for the complete novice I think.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[jamstar7]

My settop box is running a Via 600 MHz processor, 512 meg of RAM on a mini-itx motherboard, feeding AVIs to a tv screen. It also runs KDE. Picture quality is pretty good, considering.

I think I can punch it up to a gig of memory if memory serves me right. Can't remember off the top of my head what model number the motherboard is, I've had it for like 3 years...

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Gothmolly]

For $89 new, you can get a Linksys NSLU2, and run Debian Etch on it. 266 MHz ARM goodness, 10/100, 2 USB 2.0 ports. Talk about low power, low noise.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[jamstar7]

If it's using a Via EPIA motherboard (likely, they're dirt cheep in massive quantities), it'll only take 1 stick, a gig max.

Haven't had the chance to test out the SATA connection on mine yet, but the motherboard's been stable as a rock here for 3 years at 600 MHz...

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Workaphobia]

Actually I'm on a 1.2 GHz K7 Sempron/Athlon-XP on a VIA board, with 512 MB RAM and I'm running KDE without any problems. It's not as super speedy as it could be, but it's still not noticeably degraded. Besides, the perks of using a non-MS desktop environment (such as being able to kill processes before the turn of the century) more than make up for the relatively lower computing power.

KDE does not need a gigabyte of memory. Or half a gig. Open up kinfocenter and click the memory tab for a graphical depiction. I never spill over into swap unless I'm doing something particularly intensive alongside my normal activities, like processing large 3d image data with ITK, or running firefox.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[ByOhTek]

I've noticed a noticable performance improvement with KDE at over 512MB, when I do what I consider normal tasks (web browsing, document editing, etc.) The memory improvement cutoff seems lower with Gnome and most other desktop managers.

As for a non-MS solution, the biggest advantage is multiple desktops IMO. Outside of that, 6 of one, half-dozen of the other. I'm not killing processes often enough to be annoyed by the time it takes in one vs. the other.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Nullav]

Even better! You can get a $50 refund for Vista and only end up spending ~$250 for it all.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[CronoCloud]

Recent Enlightenment builds do have a "start button, or at least can be configured to have it.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Repossessed]

512 is enough for KDE as well, I'm sitting at ~350 meg consumption right now, and that's with 8 open, including iceweasel and a pdf (by far the largest of the bunch, kpdf will gladly load the entire 100 meg pdf into memory, uncompressed, if it can find the space for it.

Now, I do hit more than 512 occasionally, so I'm glad I bought more. But the bigger thing with only 512 for me would be no dual channel.

I also want to comment on Everex's plan to track 'Windows' installs on the machine by seeing how many people don't use their linux update tool. Seriously, how many people in here wouldn't just wipe it with [insert favorite distro]. Though admittedly, I think I'm gonna pitch this to my mom alongside an OEM copy of XP.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[h4rm0ny]

kpdf will gladly load the entire 100 meg pdf into memory, uncompressed, if it can find the space for it.

You probably know this, but there's a setting for KPDF to adjust this. Of course I'm coming from the opposite direction in that I always set it to "Aggressive" because I want it to load the entire thing into my copious RAM.

Anyway, while I'm posting, I might as well mention that KDE 4 is nearing release and in a staggering lack of bloating, is actually looking faster and more memory efficient than its predecessor. I tend to oscillate between Gnome and KDE with bouts of CLI when I know what I want to be doing and wont be distracted by browsing (like now). KDE 4 will probably put me into another KDE-phase and if it's as good as it's looking in the Beta, I'll likely put it on as standard for the family's desktop.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[raster]

You should try E then - as most of what you say is wrong - as of recent E17 in the last 6 months - download the gos ISO and try it first.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[AvitarX]

I am going to follow up after.

After finding a torrent for gOS and finding E17 into Gutsy Gibbon E17 is "normal" enough to be by a typical person, even being very different to Windows or Gnome. There is now (by default) a start button and the icon bar can fit many more icons. It still looked capable of going behind windows though.

I also think that the area that acts like OSX's dock is kind of rediculous because you can't see everything at once, but I blame that on gOS for having too much stuff.

E17 looks to save about 20 MiB of RAM over XFCE (20 to 40). I still think a strait Xubuntu is a better choice, but gOS is good in the sense that it looks to be turning the computer into an appliance for people who don't know how to use computers.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Nova1313]

e17 has files on the desktop and a start like button. E16 has a menu when you left click but no start button really (that I can remember). I don't think 16 had files on the desktop but I could be wrong. I've not seen anywhere that it's documented which version they are using I imagine it's 16 though. Any idea's? From what I saw they aren't even using a bare E install the theme really changes it's appearance and functionality.

Re:Anyone ever heard of the manufacturer?

[Ambidisastrous]

I think any of the lighter Gecko browsers would be decent replacements for Firefox. Kazehakase or Epiphany are pretty zippy, and they might have the added benefit of being harder for the user to screw up (I'm bracing myself for the day when Firefox extensions become a serious vector for malware). Fluxbuntu, when it's done, says it's going to use K. by default, but with the user-agent string set to Mozilla to avoid trouble on sites that try to be clever. In my experience, Gnome or KDE run reasonably well even on 256 MB of RAM, but Firefox requires a multiple of that before its responsiveness becomes sane. 512 might be the bare minimum for a decent FF experience.

On the other hand, I think the whole point of gOS is to let the browser be the entire desktop. They rely on Google apps instead of OpenOffice etc., so the rest of the system is simply a minimal environment for using Firefox -- which would certainly ease the transition for Windows users who already use Firefox.

This is actually a good step

[physicsboy500]

There are a lot of people in the market for a low end computer just to be able to get on the internet. This could spread Ubuntu to a new segment and get a new crowd accustomed to something new. Just as long as the reviewer is correct that it is responsive under most circumstances. Of course there will be things that can't be done on that laptop, but these computers aren't exactly for high-end users.

Re:This is actually a good step

[Anonymous Coward]

You aren't too smart, are you?

Re:This is actually a good step

[CaptainPatent]

Physicsboy as AC:

can't be done on that laptop, Correction, Desktop.

I was simultaneously looking up laptop parts on ebay so they were on my mind at the time.

no offence to anyone who works on it, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe that I've lived long enough to see Enlightenment become the lightweight option.

Re:no offence to anyone who works on it, but...

[jamstar7]

Same here. Why no fluxbox?

Re:no offence to anyone who works on it, but...

[Zarniwoop]

No shit. I remember back in '99 trying to figure out how to get E to be halfway responsive on my brand new P2!

How things change... though the next release still isn't out yet.

Re:no offence to anyone who works on it, but...

[FigTree]

Terrasoft did it first.

Re:no offence to anyone who works on it, but...

[glavenoid]

I think E has been a lightweight option since Gnome/KDE 2 or so. Although I like the direction Gnome and KDE have been moving towards from an end-user standpoint, they have both become way more resource hungry with each release. Enlightenment still runs superbly on low power hardware, although some may argue this is because development of E stopped in 1998 ;-)

I really can't wait for E17 to be released. The development snapshots have been very promising.

Re:no offence to anyone who works on it, but...

[CronoCloud]

If fluxbox had a "start button" and icons on the desktop by default, I'd agree, but it doesn't. As it is, I have Ctrl+F1 setup to bring up the root menu, which is handy when I'm running a maximized application.

Re:no offence to anyone who works on it, but...

[jamstar7]

If fluxbox had a "start button" and icons on the desktop by default, I'd agree, but it doesn't. As it is, I have Ctrl+F1 setup to bring up the root menu, which is handy when I'm running a maximized application.

Possibly this would do, if it were updated?

"Modern" software?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this "modern" software they speak of? Just how much horsepower do you need to browse the Web, type something in a word processor? Is there some sort of super Solitaire with realtime physics simulation and ray traced graphics that I don't know about?

Re:"Modern" software?

[porcupine8]

I was wondering that, too. I have a 1.25GHz eMac and a 1.6GHz PowerBook, and the only software I've used that doesn't run acceptably fast is NeoOffice and maybe iMovie. Word, Excel, iWork, Photoshop Elements - they're all fine.

Re:"Modern" software?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this "modern" software they speak of? Just how much horsepower do you need to browse the Web, type something in a word processor? Depends on whether your web browser is Internet Explorer 7 under Vista with ooooohultrashinytranslucency Aero!!!. Or Word 2007. Or, ah, not.

Re:"Modern" software?

[MsGeek]

I have you beat.

I'm on an iMac 500MHz G3, running Panther. Performance is slower than, say, my MacBook, but it's acceptable. 750MB RAM helps, of course. Strangely enough, Photoshop Elements 4 runs faster on the iMac than my MacBook...freaking Rosetta...

Re:"Modern" software?

[blhack]

Exactly what I thought of. I've run cubase SX (think pro-tools if you don't know what cubase is) with 4 tracks coming in off the firepod (a firewire music interface for PCs) with almost 0% latency on a 660 mhz intel celeron! I've got a 500mhz p3 thats functioning as a VPN server, a squid proxy, a webserver with PHP and MYSQL, and an FTP...all of this for about 50 users, and the thing has 64mb of ram! Paid 20 bucks for it! (go go ASU surplus ranger!)

That said, at a $200 pricepoint, and what they say is a small form factor, this box could possibly become a replacement for some of my soekris boxen. 1.5 GHZ cpu and 512mb of RAM! This could, quite possibly, be the most powerful computer i've ever owned if i buy one!

HOLY SHIT, $200 MYTHBOX!!!!!!!!!
At this price/horsepower ratio...the possibilities are pretty endless.
Good form wal-mart (except the big case...BOO!)

Re:"Modern" software?

[Hatta]

You're exactly right. I have a 1.5ghz Athlon with the same amount of RAM. It runs KDE just fine. I wish it would hash my torrents/repair my PAR2s/compress my FLACs a little quicker, but I don't have a bit of trouble running any application software I want.

Re:"Modern" software?

[Dancindan84]

"Modern software" probably refers to the shoddily written crap that gets put out on the market these days by people who think they know how to program but don't even know what the term memory management means, let alone how it works.

Re:"Modern" software?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Is there some sort of super Solitaire with realtime physics simulation and ray traced graphics that I don't know about?

Certainly not outside Vista...

Re:"Modern" software?

[kent_eh]

Yeah, really.

My family computer at home is a 1.2GHz 512MB machine that I threw together about 5 years ago. It dual-boots Ubuntu and XP, and runs everything from desktop publishing, to office apps, to web browsing to home video editing just fine for our needs.

This box would be a step up, and for half what it cost me building what I already have.
Too bad this is only WalMart USA (not their Canadian branch) selling this.

Re:"Modern" software?

[CastrTroy]

I got a laptop a few months back that has a 1.5 GHz Celeron, with 512 Megs of RAM, and an Intel onboard video card. Not only does it run KDE just fine, it run Compiz Fusion without any problems. There's no reason why this machine shouldn't be running something like KDE, in order to entice the windows users with something a little more familiar. I can't quite find which video card is included, so it's hard to say whether or not it could run Compiz Fusion. Show people that a $200 computer can look just as nice as Vista, and run significantly quicker, and you will convert a lot of people.

Re:"Modern" software?

[mgblst]

You should pop over to the US then. What it costs in petrol, you save on the $50 canadian that it actually costs.

Re:"Modern" software?

[HUADPE]

You haven't kept up with the exchange rate. $1 CA = $1.07 US

Re:"Modern" software?

[skreeech]

I think flash video in webpages and more high def content on the internet are the only things that have required a power increase in the last 7 years aren't they?

Re:"Modern" software?

[aliquis]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cxbstn2IZM

Depends on the word processor... Same old software, much higher requirements.

Re:"Modern" software?

[aliquis]

I would have bought it as webserver, would probably be "free" in the end due to lower power requirements anyway.

And if not atleast quiter and smaller (I guess, haven't looked at it yet.)

Re:"Modern" software?

[aliquis]

lol, so funny that a few flash apps in safari on my new macbook pro uses all the power of one core... Yeah, good stuff!

Hate flash.

On the Contrary ...

[eldavojohn]

Wow! Are we trying to convince people that Linux sucks? On the contrary, the article points out the hilarity that would ensue if someone would install Vista:

If users want to install Windows on it, they can, though Everex cautions that Vista will not run well without a RAM upgrade. Recent games will not run well, if at all, on the gPC: the requirements of even humble titles like World of Warcraft exceed the system specifications. I think that people are soon going to realize something that speaks to their pocket books about Linux: it runs on the slowest of hardware. Sure, webpages and plugins will require more resources but that's the great advantage Linux will always have over Windows--that minimum requirements is nearly unbeatable. So keep tweaking that kernel and you'll start to see a $150 machine go on sale that will do nearly everything. Then a $100 machine. Then an $80 machine. And so on and so forth until you'd have to be a raving lunatic (or fat rich American) to pay the beefy cost of a premium machine just so you have the resources that the latest Windows needs to consume.

How much precisely will you pay to have your UI look like glass and all your games run at the highest resolutions? I think we're approaching the point where only avid gamers & people with too much disposable income will support the ladened OS that is Windows.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Snorpus]

If memory serves, it wasn't all that long ago (1970? 1971?) that 1.5GHz, 512MB, 80GB would have been the specs on a pretty high-end machine.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[FranTaylor]

Exactly. This is the effect of free software: it raises the bar. Commercial software can exist above the bar, but not below it. When the bar is raised high enough, the free package becomes "good enough". The price of hardware is falling to the point where the Microsoft license costs more than the rest of the computer combined, and that's when the "good enough" option becomes compelling.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[that this is not und]

This week I installed Slackware 12 on an older Dell Optiplex to check it out. It is an Optiplex GX1, with a PIII-450 processor and only 384M of RAM. It runs Slackware quite snappy and acceptable, even with a 'modern' desktop (KDE). I am favorably impressed, given that I have a whole stack of these Optiplex GX1 boxes out in the garage and can get them generally for several dollars apiece at regularly held auctions locally.

I usually run NetBSD with FVWM, Seamonkey, Sylpheed for email, XCDroast, etc. on similar hardware. I'm a 'classic unixy' sort of guy who has stayed away from the 'Desktop environments' fearing bloat. I had the impression that KDE would seriously slow down the machine. Now I will need to give a second look at it and maybe build the KDE desktop from pkgsrc and see how it fares on NetBSD.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

> On the contrary, the article points out the hilarity that would ensue if someone would install Vista:

um . . . Walmart sells the same machine with Vista already loaded

go to the walmart web site and search for: Everex Impact GC3500 Desktop PC w/ Via Processor & 17" Monitor

Re:On the Contrary ...

[SlappyBastard]

You're obviously not recalling just how bad Via's chips have been.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

i think you're off by about 3 decades.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[sqrt(2)]

I bet windows XP or 2000 would install on this thing and run just as fast as this Ubuntu variant they're using and then you'd have access to much more software (and more FAMILIAR software). That is, assuming you could get drivers for everything. I'm not sure exactly what the situation is on that but there doesn't seem to be any reason it all wouldn't be supported by XP (2000, might take some work). Vista though, forget about it. There's not a single component of that computer (maybe the keyboard. maybe) that would be powerful enough to handle Vista. Who cares though, most people don't need Vista.

And the default desktop looks very nice, a huge improvement over the Ubuntu design ;)

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"1970? 1971?" How quickly they forget. That far in the past those specs would have made this thing a supercomputer. In 1990 or 1991, however, this would have been a a high-end PC. In fact, a review of it written then would have described it as being suitable for "the most power-hungry applications".

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Albanach]

i think you're off by about 3 decades.

Actually I think this is the first, real life example of the Y2K bug actually affecting something. He's just rolled over to the epoch.

It may have taken almost eight years, but at last the $billions spent have finally been justified.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[mhall119]

I bet windows XP or 2000 would install on this thing and run just as fast as this Ubuntu variant they're using So you can have a 7-8 year old OS that you can't upgrade to the next version, or a 6 month old (at most) OS that you can upgrade, for free.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[wizardforce]

How much precisely will you pay to have your UI look like glass and all your games run at the highest resolutions?

Two words: Compiz Fusion. right now it's happily running on top of/beside/with xfce and works well using less than 500 megs of RAM by the looks of it.

I think we're approaching the point where only avid gamers & people with too much disposable income will support the ladened OS that is Windows.

Not even that, WINE works fairly well with most of the games I've tried as long as you know what you're doing and it gets better with every release.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[MBGMorden]

Despite being a big Linux advocate, the same can really be said of capable versions of Windows. My parents use an AMD K6-2 350mhz machine with an 8GB hard drive and 256mb of RAM. It's running Windows 2000 with the latest Firefox installed, and an upgrade is not anywhere on the horizon for them. My mom checks email and browses eBay. My dad checks email and keeps track of his Fantasy Football teams. That machine running that software performs those functions just fine, despite being horribly outdated. My brothers machine: a Celeron 566mhz with a 40GB hard drive and 512mb of RAM, running XP. He surfs the web, uses AIM, and does his Fantasy Football thing on it. He's also not looking at upgrading anytime soon.

The simple fact is most normal people don't know the difference between a fast computer and a slow one. The only time they normally buy a new one is when their computer gets enough spyware on it that it no longer works properly. They buy that new system because the old one was "broken", not really slow. For people with free tech support (see above), that generally doesn't happen.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Ours]

1971 with 80GB??? It's not high-end, it's NSA-end at those times. In 1990 I had a 20GB HDD, and I partitioned it in two.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[hummassa]

If memory serves, it wasn't all that long ago (1970? 1971?) that 1.5GHz, 512MB, 80GB would have been the specs on a pretty high-end machine. I think -- better said, I _HOPE_ -- you are joking. But, as I didn't see a smiley --

In 1970, 1.5GHz, 512MB, 80GB would be an billion-dollar-expensive, multiple-building-sized computer.

Hell, in 1991, when I graduated, such a machine would /still/ be a supercomputer. The 1993 Cray Y-MP C90 916/16256 (16 processors) performed at 15 MFlops (the VIA C7 should be like 75 MFlops), had 1GB of RAM, and up to 32GB of solid state disks (battery-backed RAM banks), and it was closet-sized. It's not a testimony to Linux quality the fact that it runs snappy on such a machine, it's a testimony to XP/Vista's lagginess that they don't.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Snorpus]

Awww, and 1970 seems like only yesterday... s/1970/2000 s/1971/2001

Re:On the Contrary ...

[glavenoid]

How was this modded insightful? In 1990 or 1991, a 386DX 50 mhz with 8 meg ram and a 200 MB hdd would have been a high end pc, probably costing around $3,000. This walmart pc would have been completely unheard of back then. Perhaps you meant 2000 or 2001.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[moorewr]

>In 1970, 1.5GHz, 512MB, 80GB would be an billion-dollar-expensive, multiple-building-sized computer.

As far as Hertz, No such thing was possible in 1970 or 1990. Supercomputers don't use higher clock speeds to do their work - those 1980s Crays (the ones with the seat cushions!) ran at speeds on the order of 25MHz.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[xrobertcmx]

Not even 5 years ago, however that for Intel, not Via. A C7 at those speeds should be comparable to say...a high end P3?

Re:On the Contrary ...

[walt-sjc]

Yeah, but don't try and run Open Office on that machine. Gonna suck. Not that MS Office 2007 would run great either, but for a modern machine, it's still pretty pathetic. It's about at the year 2001 level.

For simple Web browsing / email, such a machine works fine. If they sold it as an email / web appliance, that would be better, but to sell it as a general purpose home PC is a little disingenuous especially as it won't run any other software that Walmart sells.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[glavenoid]

I agree. I'm using a 333 Celeron, as my main computer because my other more powerful machines are all broken and I can't afford the luxury of an upgrade. As much as I like Linux, the modern distros are terribly sluggish on this particular machine. Win2k is golden, and despite the fact that this computer is so old, it still works like a champ, and does everything I need it to.

I'm a big fan of low-cost, low power computers. Very few people really need all that processing power which invariably is put to processing eye-candy than computation. The novelty of sizzle and flash wears off fast.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[shutdown -p now]

Or put the other way: you can have an old OS which will open Word/Excel files if needed, run the best home accounting software on the market, and can handle quite a few games, or a new OS which can do none of these things.

Anyway, XP, an old OS? Seriously?

Re:On the Contrary ...

[r_jensen11]

Or, they could install XP and the average user would run Office and whichever browser of their choice with no problems. My sister still uses the same 733mhz P3 that got her through college years ago as her primary computer. Her only complaint is that she can't play the Sims 2, but she figures that game is more complexe than she wants and sticks to The Sims and Civilization 2, since they both don't require as big of time commitments

Re:On the Contrary ...

[rrkap]

I actually ran XP on a similarly capable machine and it was reasonably snappy. That being said, this computer is about as slow as than the original Pentium IV which was available when XP was released. Of course this suggests that the real competition for this system is the 5-6 year old used system from a yard sale or Craigslist which offers a similar price/performance combination.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[somersault]

Hmm I don't think you have to be an 'avid' gamer to want more than 1.5Ghz. Your point about Windows is entirely valid, but these days I'd still want at least a 2Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM and a decent graphics card just for gaming. I used to run Windows 98 until last year though, and only bought XP when games started requiring it. I hope I'm never going to buy Vista, though I may be forced to if companies don't start making games for linux (or games companies start supporting mouse/keyboard as games controllers on consoles..). Sure perhaps I have too much disposable income now, but I've actually spent way less money on computing equipment than I used to when I was a student (mostly because I have a laptop through work and it works fine for the more and more infrequent occasions that I feel like playing any new games).

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

fantasy football?, whats wrong with your family

Re:On the Contrary ...

[compro01]

huh? the latest version of OO.o runs just fine on the old p3 1ghz/512MB rig i just gave to my aunt and i imagine that machine is fairly comparable to this one.

and i don't get the "only software walmart sells" thing unless they removed adept/synaptic/etc. in the course of their customization (TFA's don't say they did, so i assume they didn't as that would be of interest and a target for annoyance here.)

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Nullav]

And you're saying that it wouldn't be possible to make an office suite that focused on efficiency? As I recall, there weren't any problems running with a 300MHz P2 just a decade ago. It wouldn't necessarily be less functional, just less shiny and a bit slower.
I'm sure there'd be quite a market for it if people actually noticed these $200 machines floating around.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[lahvak]

Actually, I just took my sons desktop, an old machine that I bought several years ago for $15 in a garage sale, and converted it temporary from Ubuntu to XP, since he is on a Lego League team and the NXT-G software they use does not run on Linux (not even through Wine). It was never a super fast desktop, but it was pretty responsive even with Gnome on it, and for his needs it was just fine. I put XP on it, turned off every single advanced display setting, and everything else I could, and installed a single piece of software on it, the Minstorms NXT-G. The machine is incredibly slow, to the point where it's barely usable. So I don't think XP would run as fast as Ubuntu in this machine. Maybe 98 (which is what the machine came with when I bought it).

Re:On the Contrary ...

[LWATCDR]

Well I would bet that XP, W2K and maybe Vista Home would run just fine on this machine.
Frankly this talk about how show it is is well just nuts.
OpenOffice will run on it. Probably the start times would be annoying but once running it would be just fine.
I have a database server that I really need to replace at my office. It is supporting about 20 users and has close to half a million records in it. That is running on a P2 233!
These people griping about how low end this machine is are just nuts. Yes it will not run games well but it will do just about anything else just fine.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Kadin2048]

In 1990 or 91 it would have been a supercomputer, too.

1991 was pre-Pentium; hot stuff then would have been a 68040 if you were a Mac user, and some sort of 486 if you used PCs.

I don't get what people's problem is with the performance of this thing. Granted, I don't upgrade very quickly (I have a dual-1GHz machine and an ancient headless Pentium-133 box under my desk, and the dual-GHz box only replaced a 400MHz one last year), but that's more than enough power for everything except gaming.

Frankly I'd like to see consumer hardware plateau so we can get off of the upgrade treadmill, and the software people can start groveling around retirement communities to find someone who knows what 'optimization' means. It's absolutely ridiculous that people think you can't do typical productivity tasks on a 1.5GHz machine.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[thisissilly]

I agree, to an extent. The difference is that Microsoft won't sell you Windows 2000 any more, and next year starting in July they won't sell you XP either, whereas I'm typing this on an old Compaq Armada with a P-III 550 and 320MB of ram, running the latest Xubuntu. Sure, the old versions of windows are still capable, but how long do you want to keep supporting them, when you can run current versions of linux?

Personal disclaimer: I used to have my parents running on a linux box, and it was fine, especially since I could ssh in remotely if something needed doing. Then my dad was given a newer machine running XP which they've had for 2 years now, and while it's worked, it hasn't been quite as nice an experience. Next time I'm home for the holidays, I am planning on bringing an extra hard drive, and setting the system up to dual boot, and get them back to linux by default.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I buy your parents' machine at Wal Mart for $200? Can I buy a similarly configured machine anywhere for $200? Most people will know the difference between paying $200 for a PC like this versus paying almost that much for Vista alone. I don't think W2K is available for purchase anymore and XP is on its way out too (if Microsoft has its way).

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Kadin2048]

Yeah, but don't try and run Open Office on that machine. Gonna suck. Not that MS Office 2007 would run great either, but for a modern machine, it's still pretty pathetic. It's about at the year 2001 level. Yeah, and as we all know, prior to 2001, the office suite market was an absolute wasteland. It's amazing we got any work done at all.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

To give you an idea, I can run KDE just fine with a 700MHz P3 and 256MB of RAM. I have a hard time understanding the bloat complaints about it.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Kadin2048]

You had a 20GB drive in 1990? I think you mean 20MB, unless you stole it from the time machine research lab. Or you had your entire basement and several million dollars dedicated to it. :)

I remember when Iomega came out with the 100MB Zip in 1994, and I thought that was cool. I was still using a 80MB drive up until then, although it had started to get really unpleasant. (I had an organizational system for 1.44MB HD floppies that still seems like a ridiculous level of anal-retentiveness today, but it was the only way I could find anything.)

To be honest I find the increase in storage capacity and decrease in cost even more interesting and important in its impact than the increase in processor speeds over the same period.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1970, 1.5GHz, 512MB, 80GB would be an billion-dollar-expensive, multiple-building-sized computer.

All he said was "high end". He didn't specify the class of machine. A billion-dollar-expensive, multiple-building-sized computer sounds pretty high-end to me ;)

Re:On the Contrary ...

[jZnat]

In fact, I think these specs are more along the line of laptops from 2004 or 2005. I've got a laptop here from around then, and it came with 512 MB of RAM, 1.6 GHz Pentium M processor, and an 80 GB harddrive. It ran XP fine back when I used XP, and it runs Kubuntu (KDE) perfectly fine. However, I do have a bit more RAM than I originally started with, but I don't think it's that much of an issue considering most of it is filled with file cache and whatnot rather than actual application memory usage.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[BlenderFX]

Anyway, XP, an old OS? Seriously?

Yes!
Windows XP release date: October 25, 2001
Currently: Thursday, November 1, 2007

Re:On the Contrary ...

[shutdown -p now]

You know just as well that date of release has little to do with it. WinXP SP2 is reasonably recent, and can do all the stuff that Ubuntu can just as fine. It's not bleeding edge (that's Vista), but it's certainly not outdated.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[r3m0t]

I suspect your computer uses far more power than the latest mid-to-low-range Intel Core 2 Duo processors.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Happy Lemming]

In 1971, with great ceremony, 64 kilobytes of core memory was added to our school's IBM 360. I remember the extra refrigerator-sized cabinet. I think that doubled the main memory. JCL and Fortran 4, yes.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[evilviper]

If memory serves, it wasn't all that long ago (1970? 1971?) that 1.5GHz, 512MB, 80GB would have been the specs on a pretty high-end machine.

Why is the MHz Myth still in force here on /. of all places? You'd think everyone would have learned after years and years of Pentium 4s.

That isn't a 1.5GHz CPU, that's a 1.5GHz VIA CPU, which means it's much closer to the performance of a 750MHz PIII/Athlon CPU than any other 1.5GHz processor.

Back in 1997 I bought a cheap system with a 300MHz Cyrix CPU. I found out very quickly that it couldn't perform remotely as well as Intel/AMD CPUs, with the most basic videos being unable to play in realtime at full-screen.

Then, several years ago when Wal-Mart released their $200 system with an 800MHz VIA C3, I was still skeptical, but, in no uncertain terms on the product page it said that the C3 performed similarly to 800MHz Intel/AMD CPUs, so I bought two... You know something, the 750MHz Athlon it it was meant to replace absolutely RAN CIRCLES AROUND IT... Screw benchmarks. I pulled the HDD out of the Athlon system, put it in the VIA system, and everything dragged. It was painfully clear I was waiting twice as long for Mozilla to launch, for ghostscript to process a printed document, videos were now dropping frames... etc.

It is absolutely astonishing to me that VIA CPUs remain popular. No doubt AMD at least sells some Semprons that are much faster, equally low power, and just as cheap. And it's far, far worse that the supposedly intelligent people on /. are so incredibly oblivious to the MHz Myth that they still get sucked in by this bullshit.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[mhall119]

Or put the other way: you can have an old OS which will open Word/Excel files if needed, run the best home accounting software on the market, and can handle quite a few games, or a new OS which can do none of these things. There are no less than 4 programs available to Linux users for opening Word and Excel files, and I have no idea what home accounting software you are referring to, about the only thing you were right about is games support, and this is obviously not a gaming PC.

And yes, XP is an old OS, just because they took so long to make Vista doesn't mean XP is "modern", and I for one don't count XP SP2 as a new release. And no, XP SP2 can't do everything that Ubuntu 7.10 can do.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Elky Elk]

it's true

I recently managed to get Linux running on my ds!

www.dslinux.org

Re:On the Contrary ...

[HermMunster]

Actually in 1990/1 we were just leaving the realm of 486s. We'd been using pentium machines for a while but they were extremely limited in the range of 33 to 133. In 1995 we still had p233, PIIs, PIIIs. Around 2000 the average person had an 700-1000mhz machine.

Back in the early 70s we didn't really even have the NEC v20 let alone a solid 8088/8086.

He's way off in his example. 3 decades is about right.

But 1.5ghz is a much more modern processor than back then. It still is pretty weak by todays standards, not because of the hardware but because of the bloated Windows software. This runs well because its linux OS runs well on it. 512mb of ram, 80gig hdd, a DVD burner are all pretty nice. I do wonder tho if it plays DVDs out of the box. Does it play mp3s? Did they license it properly?

Re:On the Contrary ...

[HermMunster]

He means 2 gig, but he's wrong. It was in the mid 90s that we saw regular use of 2 gig drives. The bios and OS had difficulty supporting 2 gigs and often you had to partition it.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[evilviper]

I don't get what people's problem is with the performance of this thing.

You've never used a VIA CPU before...

Granted, I don't upgrade very quickly (I have a dual-1GHz machine

Your system will leave this VIA1.5GHz in the dust... Probably by a factor of 3...

and an ancient headless Pentium-133 box under my desk, and the dual-GHz box only replaced a 400MHz one last year),

I'm using a 1.2GHz Duron, but that is only because the motherboard for my 750MHz Athlon fried, and this mobo+CPU was $60, and was practically the only mobo I could find that would allow me to keep using my GB of PC-133. As an added bonus, with the use of fvcool, it idles at 40W (pretty damn good).

My firewall is a K6-III 550MHz undervolted and underclocked to 100 MHz, running on about 8 watts, and a load average of 0.08.

With all that said, I still think this VIA system is terribly underpowered. A 1.5GHz Intel/AMD would be plenty fast, but NOT a 1.5GHz VIA.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[HermMunster]

The article states it comes with open office and a lot more local software (as they put it). So, don't go saying that this thing is a dead weight. The processor is essentially the same class as an athlon 2000+, 2400+, and even 2500+ processor. Those processors play games very well with an average video card.

What they are implying about gaming is 1) it is not a gaming machine because DirectX games don't run on Linux very well, and not at all without programs such as cedega or wine. 2) they are probably saying that it doesn't run games because it probably doesn't support an add-in video card. If it does I'll be shocked. If it does, it would make fine workstations for gaming and video with the right software.

1.5ghz is a solidly performing processor. 512mb of ram is sufficient for most every productivity program. 80gigs of storage is adequate for a large amount of information for the average home user. A DVD burner makes it a overall a solid box for home users.

I'll be it is filled with Maxtor hard drives. Unfortunately, I never buy Maxtor any longer because of their poor customer service. Seagate, which is owned by Maxtor, is still a separate company and does things right. Western Digital is a solid HDD manufacturer. So, I'd like to see something in there besides Maxtor drives.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[homer_ca]

The problem is, web surfing isn't what it used to be. AJAX and Flash will easily max out a P3 500Mhz, and remember the VIA is a pretty low power CPU. An 800Mhz C3 is about as fast as a 500Mhz P3. The 1.5Ghz C7 might run as fast as a 1Ghz P3.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Luser! I do KDE on PII 266s with 128 and it's fine. No hard drive, no swap.
        The shut off point for me on the KDE is when you get into the early Pentium CPUs without cache. Even those are fine with KDE if you keep it light. In fact, I still have two of those going right now but not for stuff that is highly interactive. Having said that though, if I need a browser there's nothing wrong with them.
        I had a Pentium 90 running DSL-N on 64megs that I was using for light browsing with Seamonkey and as an always on XGalaga station and some SNES but it finally fried out last week. It did play XGalaga a bit slow but that actually was a good thing because I'd practice on that one and then get the patterns down quicker.
        To me, anything that is considered PII and has 256Megs is a fast machine.
        Although having said all that, I thought YouTube sucked until I used my wife's 1.5Ghz notebook and then I realized that my machines weren't quite up to snuff for Flash video. But hey, fuck Flash video and fuck Adobe and most importantly fuck Macromedia for not opening up their tools that were targeted at the education market.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[QRDeNameland]

Actually in 1990/1 we were just leaving the realm of 486s. We'd been using pentium machines for a while but they were extremely limited in the range of 33 to 133. In 1995 we still had p233, PIIs, PIIIs.

Your dates are off quite a bit.

The 486 first went on sale in 1989, and the first Pentiums were not out until March, 1993.

The Pentium Pro didn't come out until November 1995, Pentium II was May 1997, and Pentium III was February 1999.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[vivtho]

Seagate owns Maxtor ... and not the other way around.

WRT your other points...
The processor used in this machine uses a completely different architecture and cannot be compared MHz-for-MHz with Athlons or Pentium 4s.
I don't have much experience with gaming on Linux (I tried it once and was sorely disappointed), but I don't see how this machine will be able to run any Linux games other than the extremely basic FreeCiv and other low graphics. Without an separate graphics card, this machine is going to depend on it's processor to provide the horsepower for displaying graphics - horsepower this machine does not have.

What I think this computer is going to be good at is
- Basic web browsing.
- Office work.
- Music.
- Movies.

All in all, although this is not a great computer, I think it makes sense for it's target audience. The people who consider the computer to be just another appliance in the home and expect it to work the same way. The target audience would not expect or know enough to upgrade the hardware or software every year or two, maintain and protect the software from spyware and viruses/virii etc. They would expect it to start up reasonably fast (maybe boot time should take no longer than the time it takes to load a DVD into a player), get them online and get their letters/reports/finances done.

Finally a question of my own..
The distro loaded on this system is derived from Ubuntu. Do they pre-load the codecs to play proprietary formats, or the user expected to find and load them on their own?

Re:On the Contrary ...

[martalli]

We have an Asus barebones with an 800mhz via c3 processor. It's running the current version of kubuntu without any problems. Opening OOo or firefox has a noticeable lag, but they are very usable once opened. I have a great core 2 duo laptop and desktop at home, but they are actually not necessary for regular 'productivity tasks'. Ask anyone using linux on older hardware, or a mac user still on a g4 for example.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[martalli]

In our office, we actually use a hodgepodge of computers that we reclaimed more or less from the local hospital about to discard them, or from garage sales. While many slashdotters are perfectly capable of installing linux on an old rig and getting a serviceable outcome, the target wal-mart shopper would be much more comfortable with a turn-key solution.

I like how the availability of open source linux means that the hardware providers are fairly free to create their own hardware and then snap on a nearly ready-made OS. All they need is a few programmers to flesh out a custom solution, without worrying to a large degree about payments to MS that are way out of proportion (the windows version costing nearly $300 means that a third of the cost of the windows version is simply for a barebones OS)

Re:On the Contrary ...

[walt-sjc]

This isn't a p3. It's a via. TOTALLY different animal. Via sucks. Everything about this mobo is going to suck because they use the cheapest parts they can get their hands on. It's not going to have a high-end 3d gaming video card chipset in there. Probably shared memory too.

As for "only software walmart sells", I'm obviously referring to what you buy on the shelf - not what comes with the machine. Don't be obtuse.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[glavenoid]

Although I didn't make it clear, I meant low processing power, not low power consumption, which I am a big fan of also.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[digitalaudiorock]

I think that people are soon going to realize something that speaks to their pocket books about Linux: it runs on the slowest of hardware. Absolutely. I recently rebuilt a friends old Dell Optiplex GX1 (512 MB ram, 450 Mhz) with kubuntu. For the everyday stuff he's doing, his DSL connection is his only significant speed bottleneck. He's thrilled to death with it. I'd expect that 1.5 Ghz to be pretty good...and after all, we are talking $200.

Tom

Re:On the Contrary ...

[walt-sjc]

Are you saying that office 2007 performs the same as office 2000? Or OOo the same as 2000? Really... Having run both, I beg to differ. Office 2K is much faster than current Open Office on the same machine. Open Office has been plagued with performance problems for years. In fact, MS Office 2K runs faster in a vmware virtual machine than open office does natively on the same machine! That says something.

Despite that, I still primarily use OOo because my modern linux systems are screaming fast and the result is "fast enough".
I'm not knocking OOo (other than on performance, a criticism it deserves) as much as I am the performance that machine will have.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[logicpaw]

As far as Hertz, No such thing was possible in 1970 or 1990. Supercomputers don't use higher clock speeds to do their work - those 1980s Crays (the ones with the seat cushions!) ran at speeds on the order of 25MHz.

The first ones with the seat cushions were Cray 1's, 1976 vintage, single CPU, 80 MHz processor clock. A 1988 vintage Cray Y-MP had from 2 to 8 processors at around 167 MHz.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[moorewr]

but still impossible! No amount of dollars in 1970 could have bought you a 1 GHz processor.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[moorewr]

Thanks for the details!

Re:On the Contrary ...

[paxmark1]

Hi, My via-itx Ubuddy in 2003 got changed to intel when vendor could not get the voltage regulator right. Over 12 weeks in RMA.

Is it little-endian or big-endian? It was a problem with the first Mandrake install, but with the next version, install went well back in 2003.

40 gb hard drive and 512 mb ram is suff quant for me with Kubuntu with a few bells (update notifier replaced by line in anacron 0 etc.) disabled. And open office works like a charm usually. I edited a 35 page thesis for a friend without a hiccup using openoffice. I still am satisfied with it.

The key to newbies for this is - are they flexible. I have introduced people to linux from all over the world via their coming to L'arche, and many can adapt, and some can't. And the ones who can't are often inflexible about other items.

So, it would be nice to hear more details about the onboard video, number processing with itx (was a little weak) and any snafus noted with big endian if it is big endian.

The piece of mind alone from not getting sucked into all that spyware and viruses and gator that noobies often do (I see what 18 to 25 y.o. people from all over the world do to windows boxen), nice machines that crawl. It can't be any worse than what happens to window boxes.

The other thing about a big box is that it allows a much cheaper dvd-rw. I am on third thin burner - and the APOS cheap crap that I bought does not work well with either. Quality thin dvd players of writer are not cheap.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[steveha]

in no uncertain terms on the product page it said that the C3 performed similarly to 800MHz Intel/AMD CPUs
[...]
the 750MHz Athlon it it was meant to replace absolutely RAN CIRCLES AROUND IT

Not really surprising.

An 800 MHz C3 runs its floating point unit at half the clock rate. This especially sucks for 3D games; the frame rate would be terrible.

Newer Via chips such as the C7 run the floating point at full clock rate, so there's a huge performance hit that you were seeing, which does not apply.

That said, clock-for-clock any Athlon will be faster than any Via.

Still, my guess is that the 1.5 GHz C7 ought to perform well enough to run a Linux desktop. And with a good heatsink you would be able to run it fanless, which is an attractive idea to me.

steveha

Re:On the Contrary ...

[xigxag]

It wouldn't surprise me if 512MB is more than the entire amount of RAM that existed on the planet in 1971. And just to put things in more modern perspective, the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 3.1 were 2MB RAM and for Windows 95, 4MB (realistically 8-16MB). We've gotten spoiled to think that 1GB is or should be a minimum for an OS to work properly.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I care crush has to say just as I care what you have to say. Then again, If I cared about what you have to say then I wouldn't be listening to crush and if I didn't care about what crush has to say *head explodes* ;)

Re:On the Contrary ...

[compro01]

1. from what i've read about that processor, it running at 1.5ghz seems to be roughly comparable to a p3 at 1ghz. i didn't say it was a p3, i said it would seem to perform more-or-less like a p3 that lower speed.

2. *shrug*. barring them being so cheap it causes stability issues, i don't see the problem.

3. so? that's not the market it is aimed at. this system is adequate for mundane uses, such as home accounting, family photos, email, web browsing, and light games. (think majong, sudoko, solitaire, etc.). it's like complaining that a tack hammer isn't very useful for demolition.

4. i have yet to ever see linux software in walmart (barring windows software that will run on wine), so i'm not sure what you're on about for that.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[hairyfeet]

While I do agree that for your unknowing Walmart users it would probably suck,I also remember reading that Via chip has Mpeg 2 decoding built in. Now if it'll run Win2K Pro(don't know how good MythTV would work with Via hardware decoding) and has one PCI slot I think it'd make a nice low power DVR. I could set it up beside the TV and when the 80Gb gets full just use the burner to backup. Now for something like that I bet it would be good.

But if someone wanted to run Windows on it, I'd go Win2K Pro. I am currently writing this on a 1.1Ghz Celeron with 512Mb of PC100 and Win2K Pro and this little thing makes a great workbox. Openoffice,Irfanview,AVG, and several other apps are running now without any lag. Of course I switched back to OO.o 1.5 (2.X was too bloaty) but other than that no troubles. I bet the Via should get about the same performance as this Cele with less wattage. Just my 2p,anyway.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[vtcodger]

That'd be about right

For the edification of the kiddies, I went out to the garage and found the December 1993 issue of Computer Shopper. Top Data's full page ad says you can get an NT workstation -- 486DX-2-66 with 8mb of memory and a 340mb SCSI hard Drive for $2980. Need a bigger hard drive? 4C will sell you a 1200MB SCSI drive for $1000. Need more memory? At Associates Computer Supply, generic SIMMS are down to $40 a megabyte -- from $100 a megabyte a few years earlier.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[jcaplan]

It will run Open Office just fine. You are making an assumption here without presenting any supporting data. Here is one data point:

I just retired a 800 MHz Athlon with 512 MB RAM and Suse Linux 10.1, not because it ran anything slowly, but because I wanted a laptop and also the fan was a bit loud. Open Office ran quite nicely on it. *Launching* some applications such as Open Office and Eclipse was slow, but that was primarily a function of hard drive speed rather than processor speed, which won't be much different on this machine versus a "high end machine." *Running* these applications never felt slow. It did fine with KOffice, OpenOffice, Eclipse, Evolution a bunch of terminal, and whatever else going at the same time. I had a similarly speced XP laptop that would just choke on having a couple applications open. Seemed like XP had a poor virtual memory implementation to me.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[rrkap]

I'm really not sure what the market for this computer is. Linux is still pretty tricky as a desktop OS - about as good as Windows 98 (which would run much faster on the same hardware). My expectation is that if the customers are as unsophisticated as WalMart expects they are then most of these computers will soon get a pirated copy of XP (Or even 98... I think I have one of those floating around somewhere) installed on them, and if they're sophisticated to maintain a Linux system then they're sophisticated enough to buy a used system or and convert it to Linux (or just use it as-is).

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Mr. Ksoft]

Hilariously, I have a 486DX2-66 with 8MB of memory and a 518MB HDD that was bought just over a year later for a mere $1000. Prices drop FAST.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[bondjamesbond]

& people with too much disposable income will support the ladened OS that is Windows

Oh I get your angle now. It's a money thing. Like those people who speak out against SUV's and then, when they make bank, go out and buy one.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, straight up the Via chips fairly well suck, performancewise; but, they max at I think 10 watts power usage when running full tilt; some models max at like 1 or 2 watts, which is nice. I don't know if it is or not, but Wal-Mart could have the machine completely fanless if they want to.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[owlstead]

I am running OOo on a VIA EPIA 1.2 GHz C7 (fan-less) system and a 120 GB 2.5 " drive and Open Office (OOo) runs just fine. OK, I've got double the amount of memory, but the biggest slowdown is, only at startup, caused by the harddrive. I'll replace the hard drive with flash when I've reinstalled the freakin' X11 unichrome graphics after upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy gibbon).

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got to disagree....I've built a mini-itx PC recently and am currently using it with OpenOffice and as a media server box. I do run 1 GB of memory in it, but it's moved from my home office to my office at work, and runs just fine with movies, audio and just about anything else I throw at it. Yeah, it's also small and people come by my desk and tell me it's "cute" to have a PC that fits into a 7 inch by 7 inch by 2 inch box, but I hit the KVM switch and go back to developing web apps and database work.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[dbIII]

Turn DMA on. For some reason Open Office does a vast amount of disk access at startup so takes a very long time to start on a system with a very slow disk.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, come on guys give me a break! In 1976 I finished my dissertation at the Ohio State University by running programs with 256K of Fortran at 3 AM because that was the only time that much memory was available. The entire university ran on a state of the art IBM 370-168 with one meg of memory, half of which was dedicated to administrative tasks. I would have killed for an IBM AT. I never published my dissertation because I couldn't get my programs to run on the 50K of memory which was all that was on the machine at the University where I had my first appointment. You are all moaning and groaning about the $199 supercomputer at Wal-Mart? Bleech!

Re:On the Contrary ...

[ScrewMaster]

... or fat rich American

Just out of curiosity (and I know this is completely off-topic) but just how far does our economy have to crash, how small must our middle class become, how many outright poor people must live here before I'll be able to stop reading comments like that? There are fat rich assholes everywhere on the planet you know. I might add the bulk of Slashdot readers are American, so slights aren't the way to gain credence for your commentary.

More to the point, there's obviously a limit to how cheap you can make a product. Even if you manage to fully automate your production facilities and eliminate your personnel costs, an $80 computer isn't going to be very capable. For that matter, this $200 PC is probably being sold for a few bucks over manufacturing cost, and given that this is Wal-Mart quite likely the manufacturer isn't making much profit out of it, if any. This is just a loss-leader, something to drive customers to the store where they'll pick up lots of higher-margin items.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[ToasterMonkey]

"GNOME Office" or KOffice ought to be quite a bit slimmer than OO or MS Office and fit for at least basic office needs.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[smilindog2000]

I wonder how well it would run Asterisk, or the TrixBox distro in particular? I installed two boxes less powerful than this for Asterisk, and frankly, the lack of a low-end PC like this has hampered it's adoption. If they'd just can the big stupid box, and put it in something cheaper, closer to the Mac Mini, it'd be even cooler.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[gilescampion]

I think he is refering to Quicken.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[evultrole]

In 1990 I had a 20GB HDD, and I partitioned it in two. Liar. You people are all completely insane. Never mind that in 1990, unless you were using a high end unix workstation (which would make two partitions idiocy) you would have been running an operating system with a 2.1GB partition size limit, as FAT16 file systems only came around 3 years earlier (1987). Perhaps you meant a 2 GB drive, though in 1990 that too would be extraordinarily large. In 1998 I bought a computer with a 10GB hard drive, and it was considered to be gigantic at the time. I would direct you to this graph of computer drive size (max) scaled by year. Note that drive sizes did not pass 10GB until well after 1995. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png Perhaps this is why people don't find it disgraceful to make a linux operating system that has a 1.2GHz CPU as a minimum requirement, you're all crazy and can't remember how long ago these things were made. These wal-mart computer would have been monster stations just 5-6 years ago (remember back in 99-00 when the big 1GHZ limit was broken? Yeah, I didn't think so.) and now you're all talking about how nice it is that it can almost run linux well... I have linux running on a 250Mhz PDA, what the hell is wrong with people that they would use a product that barely runs on these?

Re:On the Contrary ...

[mhall119]

Oh, well I don't use Quicken, but a quick check of my repository shows gnucash and kmymoney2 as Quicken alternatives for Ubuntu, I also know there used to be a couple of Java based ones, so it not like he wouldn't have options.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[lostjimmy]

I'll have to disagree with you on that one. I'm running linux on an old Toshiba laptop with 933 MHz Pentium 3 with 512 MB of RAM and, although it takes several seconds to start up, it runs more than fast enough for everyday use.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[crush]

There you go, spoiling speculation with empirical evidence ;)

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Calinous]

The 1GHz P3 (Coppermine with 256KB cache, not Tualatin with 512) would mostly equal a P4 at 1.3-1.4 GHz. The very first P4 processors were inferior to the latest and greatest P3 in general performance

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Calinous]

I'm sure it plays mp3s - in the end, I've seen a console mp3 player running on a K5 at 100MHz (and before that, on an 100MHz 486-class processor).
      Having a VIA processor, I assume it has VIA chipset with integrated video. If I remember correctly, the DVD playing is hardware assisted (but the processor would be fast enough to play DVDs software only).
      Is the software installed? Maybe yes, maybe not - after all, a stand-alone DVD-player is very cheap

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Calinous]

Trixbox suggests 1GB of RAM and a P4-1500 for 20 or so simultaneous users (if I remember correctly). With half the RAM, you get half the users.
      Encoding and decoding audio is a task that uses memory and processor speed, and you must have both to be able to do it.
      This would be perfect for a low-use Trixbox server (a few simultaneous connections), but this would be it.

Re:On the Contrary ...

[Calinous]

Windows 98 is faster than Linux on an Internet connected PC - at least in the first days. After that, there would be plenty of small applications sharing the Internet access (and less so the processor and memory).
      By the time you protect a Windows 98 machine to be as virus/worm/... proof as a Linux machine, you end up with a slower overall performance.
      But there are a few kinds of people:
1. Those willing and able to work with Linux. Some of them would buy new computers and install Linux, others would buy old computers and install Linux. For $200, you might be able to buy a better PC (old) than the one in the article
2. People who want Windows - they would probably buy a not much more expensive PC with Windows preinstalled.
3. People who mostly use Internet, and a word processor, and maybe some more things. This PC would be great - cheap, and does all they need to do. Those people are the target

Re:On the Contrary ...

[aonaran]

That's exactly where Asterisk would do best.
Get into the small businesses with 3-4 extensions and voice mail. This box is more than enough and costs about the same as a good set.
If people started setting up phone businesses around Asterisk and actively pursuing the SMB markets by offering features that the Nortel small business offerings can't compete with (voice mail e-mailed to you?) Asterisk would really take off.

I'm in the process of setting up trixbox in a VM for my small business. (I had set up a debian Asterisk a couple years ago just for fun)

Storage?

[kaellinn18]

This seems like a great machine to use for backups and file storage on a home network. Just replace the 80GB hard drive with a bigger one (if necessary), and you have an extremely cheap file server.

Re:Storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a silly idea. A 1TB networked disk is less than $300 (LaCie 1TB Big Disk Gigabit Ethernet Disk) and is plug and play to Windows, Linux and Macs.

Re:Storage?

[Phillup]

This is a silly idea. A 1TB networked disk is less than $300 (LaCie 1TB Big Disk Gigabit Ethernet Disk) and is plug and play to Windows, Linux and Macs. You might want to look a bit closer before using that with Linux if you have files with the same name (different case) in a directory... I'm betting that thing doesn't use a case sensitive file system.

Oh great!

[eneville]

Great! Now more people want help on the linux forums.

Re:Oh great!

[Marc Desrochers]

Funny maybe, but that would be a good thing no? We want more people using Linux no? Isn't that what we're all pushing for all the time? Or are we now going to be elitist about it?

Re:Oh great!

[Selfbain]

We'll probably need more people then to keep up the level of mockery people have come to expect.

Re:Oh great!

[NineNine]

C'mon. Most Wal-Mart shoppers are barely literate. You won't see any Wal-Mart customers in Linux forums any time soon, I'd bet.

Re:Oh great!

[magarity]

They're also the same people who are going to buy a mini-ITX motherboard rattling around a midsize tower case because "The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability."
 
So, how big are the Linux forums, hmm?

Re:Oh great!

[eck011219]

I know you're kidding, but your statement really does represent a lot of the reasons why new users are intimidated by Linux. It's not hard but it's different, and asking a simple question in a forum is often met with ten snotty comments about reading the manual (which is often incomplete or cryptic) and no actual helpful answers. People don't like to feel dumb, and sadly we geeks have a tendency to accidentally or intentionally demean new users when we should be trying to encourage and help them.

Re:Oh great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhat flamebait, sure. But it's certainly an accurate portrayal. When I started using Debian in 2002 and ran into a problem, all I encountered were rabid fanboys defending the OS and furiously stroking their water-cooled, window-modded ePeens. There are so many Linux-centric forums that are nothing but continuous, egotistical pissing contests. Just about the only forum that manages to maintain a level of civility is the Ubuntu board.

upgradeability?

[Gothmolly]

Can you add a tuner card and something with TV-out? This seems like a great MythTV machine.

Re:upgradeability?

[brunascle]

being a mini itx mobo, it probably only has 1 PCI slot. if you got a USB tuner, maybe.

Re:upgradeability?

[nuzak]

> This seems like a great MythTV machine.

With a VIA CPU?!?!?!\N{INTERROBANG}

I think you're wildly optimistic. I don't think it could handle the front or back end.

Re:upgradeability?

[CastrTroy]

Why would you need more than 1 PCI slot? You can get a dual tuner that only takes up 1 slot.

Re:upgradeability?

[CastrTroy]

I have an Athlon 3200+. When recording video, it uses maybe 10% of my computer's processor power. That's because all the MPEG encoding is done by the chip on the TV Tuner. You don't need a machine with any kind of CPU power to act as a Media Centre.

Re:upgradeability?

[brunascle]

1 for the tuner card, the other for a video card w/ tv-out. the PVR-500 has s-video in, but not out.

Re:upgradeability?

[CastrTroy]

But if you're using an funky new HDTV, then you don't need S-Video out, because they have VGA in.

So 1998

[Anonymous Coward]

By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE)

Enlightenment, that's so 1998.

But on the positive site it would be fast and responsive.

Let's get some data

[l2718]

I'd love to know how well these will sell -- perhaps we can arrange a follow-up in a few months?

More seriously, this falls under the "computers as appliances" paradigm. This "home computing appliance" cost less than many "home gaming" appliances, about as much as a cheap all-in-one sound system. It delivers basic internet functionality. The users shouldn't care what OS it runs anymore than they care what OS their printer runs. This is not to say that there can be a potential snag: users trying to install Microsoft-targeted software off the web. I hope there's a good version of wine installed.

Re:Let's get some data

[timeOday]

More seriously, this falls under the "computers as appliances" paradigm. This "home computing appliance" cost less than many "home gaming" appliances, about as much as a cheap all-in-one sound system. It delivers basic internet functionality.

Actually it has a lot of capabilities missing in any version of Windows short of Server, such as unrestricted number of clients for fileserving. And it comes preinstalled with a lot more than just the OS, including a full-featured office suite.

there can be a potential snag: users trying to install Microsoft-targeted software off the web

Then again that's one of the biggest advantages, since the other word for "Microsoft-targeted software off the web" is "malware." Granted, they'll be annoyed when certain things don't run, but having your computer taken over is annoying too.

Re:Let's get some data

[Anonymous Coward]

More seriously, this falls under the "computers as appliances" paradigm. Since when is that new?

This "home computing appliance" cost less than many "home gaming" appliances ...except it can't render 300 million+ polygons/sec, and it's not PS3, XBOX or Wii compatible. Mom and Dad don't buy gaming appliances.

about as much as a cheap all-in-one sound system ...except it doesn't have optical I/O, HDMI or RCA connectors and no high-quality preamps. It's not fanless. The housing has no info display, and it's in the wrong form factor.

It delivers basic internet functionality. Yes. That's what Mom and Dad need. Can it help them easily edit and catalog photos of the grandkids? I suppose it could run Picasa for Linux under Wine, but probably not very fast.

The users shouldn't care what OS it runs anymore than they care what OS their printer runs. Agreed. We're getting close to the "web as operating system" paradigm. So think of this computer as a "thinnish client."

This is not to say that there can be a potential snag: users trying to install Microsoft-targeted software off the web. I hope there's a good version of wine installed. If it's an Ubuntu fork, then yes, Wine is integrated nicely. We shall see. The gOS website goes live in about 9 minutes (9am PDT).

Re:Let's get some data

[GnuAge]

If it's an Ubuntu fork, then yes, Wine is integrated nicely. Are you sure about that? Probably this box has integrated Via video. Google "wine gutsy unichrome" some time; as soon as you try to use wine on Gutsy with the "via" driver it hard-locks X. I can SSH to the box but can't seem to kill X and have to reboot.

Re:Let's get some data

[Nullav]

"I miss my Garfield cursor. This thing can't even run Bonzai Buddy. And what am I going to do without Weather Bug? Worst machine ever. I'm going back to Windows."

Lack of hard details

[downix]

I wanted to know, how many slots (likely 1) and of what type. Which embedded GPU it has. What kind of RAM it used and how many free memory slots.

I'd buy something like this for the little one (or an OLPC or an EEE PC or the like) but I'd need to know how far it will grow first.

Re:Lack of hard details

[Penguinisto]

...go to the store, pop open a terminal on one of the demos, and start browsing a bit through /proc? I bet you could find out in very short order most of what you need to know.

/P

Re:Lack of hard details

[Sly-Guy]

Unichrome Pro chipset.

This sounds like an off the shelf EPIA board. I called Everex to verify, but the technician was unable to provide any information other than the graphics and processor.

Summary missed the most part: Case

[bagofcrap]

These computers are in cases that would fit a full-size ATX motherboard. Supposedly Wallmart did a survey, and found that most of their customers believe "Bigger is Better", even when it isn't. It is not a terrible deal given that it's a mini-ATX motherboard, but using that big a case for it is just wasting space.

Even better than that, the computers being sold as 'green PC' meaning thats the mfr's product name, and has nothing to do with being enviromentally conscious.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[bagofcrap]

Whoops, mini-ITX not mini-ATX

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[Paridel]

This computer uses VIA's new "carbon free" processor:

http://www.via.com.tw/en/resources/pressroom/2006_archive/pr060913VIAC7D.jsp

The 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU consumes <20 Watts. So is seems there is a good reason to call it a "green pc"?

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[timeOday]

It is not a terrible deal given that it's a mini-ATX motherboard, but using that big a case for it is just wasting space.

It provides more room for expandability. I can certainly see wanting to at least add a second hard drive for backups.

has nothing to do with being enviromentally conscious.

From the Via website: " Developed from the ground up for low power operation, the VIA C7 processor is based on the advanced VIA CoolStream(TM) Architecture and manufactured using IBM's state-of-the-art 90nm Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) process, and delivers the greatest performance per watt in the business.

Capable of running up to 2.0GHz with ultra low power consumption of around 20 watts peak power and operating at an average power of less than 1 watt, the VIA C7 processor is the embodiment of cool processing and sets the standards for next generation of desktop, mobile and personal electronics systems."

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Even better than that, the computers being sold as 'green PC' meaning thats the mfr's product name, and has nothing to do with being enviromentally conscious.

This doesn't surprise me. Even the most green "on the surface" companies are't very, when you dig a little.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[jeblucas]

Even better than that, the computers being sold as 'green PC' meaning thats the mfr's product name, and has nothing to do with being enviromentally conscious.

Not only that, I heard that Alienware PC's are in fact, not made by aliens at all.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[martalli]

ATX cases can often be bought cheap. Many brand-name computers ship with mATX motherboards. Honestly, I don't see the downside here, except for space. The larger computer has expandability and its rock-bottom cheap. I think Everex quite possibly put it in such a large case for cost reasons over some psychology issue. The people using psychologists to design their hardware is Apple.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[bagofcrap]

And the power, not to mention oil needed to make the larger case is of course free.

Similarly, the Exxon Valdez spill was great for the environment, because of all the diesel saved because it crashed. If it hadn't crashed, it probably would still be running today, burning diesel, which is bad for the environment.

Power consumption definitely has a part in being environmentally conscious, but a needlessly larger case doesn't help it.

This isn't a slightly bigger case in case you wanted a 2nd hard drive. This is a drastically bigger case for if you wanted 7 more.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a backup, it's a copy. You are protected against certain types of hardware failure and data corruption, but you can't really have a backup on a medium that's permanently attached.

Pick up 2 40 GB external USB drives. Do backups onto those. Alternate them.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[dan the person]

has nothing to do with being enviromentally[sic] conscious.

In addition to what the parent said about low power, it's also the -D variant of the C7, this one comes with carbon offsets.

http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/c7-d/

World's First Carbon Free Processor

The VIA C7®-D processor is the world's first Carbon Free computer component, helping individuals and organizations reduce their Carbon Footprint. For every VIA C7-D processor sold VIA works with environmental experts to calculate the electricity used over the processors lifetime (assumed to be 3 years). Then from the amount of electricity used, VIA calculates how much CO2 emissions will be released into the environment mainly as a result of fossil fuel burning power plants, and then works with regional offset organizations to "offset" that amount of CO2 through projects such as:

        * Reforestation: Planting trees in different areas around the world that absorb (or sequester) CO2 as they grow.
        * Alternative Energy: By promoting alternative energy such as Solar power, power plants don't need to burn as much fossil fuels reducing the amount of CO2 released into the environment.
        * Energy conservation: Efforts to help reduce the amount of energy used, meaning that power plants don't need to burn so much fossil fuels reducing the amount of CO2 released into the environment.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[hey!]

Bingo.

If you know the way WalMart works, you know that it's silly to speculate that they have some magical marketing formula for selling these things. These things aren't meant to be bought; it's just an unfortunate side effect of their true function: to bring people in to gawk at the $200 computer before they decide they really want to buy something more expensive (and it turns out priced about the same as the competition). That's what WalMart is about: low price point stunts to rope you in, settle for something that looks priced about the same as the competition, but is really a special cheapo SKU that looks like the real thing.

As for this thing, nothing says "sex appeal" like a mid-tower case. That is nothing says "sex appeal" in such an unconvincing way. But fair enough: it's a cheap computer, not small enough to be cute, just big enough to be dowdy. But did I mention it's cheap?

If they wanted to sell a gazillion of these, then a small, cute case would be an asset well worth investing in. Personally, I'd do something like make a case with a veneer of sustainably harvested bamboo, and market it as a "green" pc.

But really they intend to lose money on this, just as little as possible. I wouldn't count on using the space in the case for expanding, unless you replace the incredibly crappy power supply the thing probably has.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to Jose.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an Everex notebook. It has a 1.5Ghz Via C7M processor and came with 512MB of RAM. It had Vista installed, but I never booted into it. I am happily running Debian Etch with KDE. I have no issues. I did find a great deal on RAM and picked up another 1GB stick for $40 so I now have 1.5GB of RAM. However, for the first four months I was running on 512MB with 128MB going to video RAM and I had no problems.

I had no issues with the laptop. Battery life is great, so the low wattage of the CPU is excellent. A few months ago Via put out a graphics driver for my chipset, and I installed it a few weeks ago. Before that I was running using VESA drivers.

Firefox runs smoothly on it. I have vanilla Firefox installed, not IceWeasel on this machine. I cannot think of anything wrong with the Via C7 line of processors.

Disclaimer: My main machine is a Sempron 2800+ running at 1.6Ghz with 1GB of RAM. I have never had a computer over 1.6Ghz, so my view of the web has not changed in years. Before upgrading to the Sempron, I was running an Athlon XP 1800+ at 1.53Ghz. I have sat at a friends Dell XPS using a cpu over 3Ghz, but that thing was stuck with Vista and runs very, very slow.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[MojoStan]

Whoops, mini-ITX not mini-ATX Also, another nitpick from your original comment:

These computers are in cases that would fit a full-size ATX motherboard. Actually, a full-size ATX board (7 expansion slots) would not fit in that case (4 slots). That case is for microATX boards (9.6" x 9.6"), not "full" ATX (12" x 9.6"). That still seems ridiculously large for a mini-ITX board (6.7" x 6.7", 1 slot), though.

That case also looks like it's designed following Intel's Thermally Advantaged Chassis specification, which was created when Intel's CPU temperatures were getting out of control (NetBurst era). The back of the case has a space for a 92mm exhaust fan and the side of the case has intake vents directly over where the CPU and external graphics card would be in a microATX case. All this for a CPU that consumes 20W max at load.

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[jez9999]

Not only that, I heard that Alienware PC's [alienware.com] are in fact, not made by aliens at all.

You've obviously never heard of immigration. :-)

Re:Summary missed the most part: Case

[kauttapiste]

Even better than that, the computers being sold as 'green PC' meaning thats the mfr's product name, and has nothing to do with being enviromentally conscious.

Not only that, I heard that Alienware PC's are in fact, not made by aliens at all.

What shocks me the most is that Pine Computers are in fact, not made out of pine at all.

Sounds like a servicable Web/mail server to me...

[DamonHD]

Probably quite power-efficient with that chipset so long as they have a recent (tickless) kernel in it, such as with Gutsy, though I would like a little more memory for one of my apps:

http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html

Might also do nicely as an off-the-shelf monitoring device for networks, HVAC, etc...

If they sell one at a similar price here I might buy one to play with.

Rgds

Damon

Quiet and low power

[crow]

The C7 processor doesn't use much power, so unless they put in an extra-noisy fan, this should be both a low-power and quiet system.

More ....

[Ancient_Hacker]

• More responsive than Vista!
• More responsible than Congress!
• A better parent than Britney!
• More reliable than IE 1.0!
• More secure than walking down an alley in the South Bronx at 2 AM!
• More fun than a root-canal at the Albanian Dental School!

Re:More ....

[Facetious]

More free time than a slashdot nerd. Wait...

Re:More ....

[ShatteredArm]

I don't think they have alleys in the South Bronx. I didn't notice any, anyhow.

Re:More ....

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Albanian I can vouch for the Dental School joke.

In fact after we remove your tooth it's customary to give you a slap in the ass. How is that for science.

No, really?

[Computershack]

By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers."

You don't say.... Doesn't take a genius to work out that if you use a desktop manager about as feature filled as Windows 3.1 was, you're going to end up with a fast desktop. However, I suspect someone booting it for the first time is going to look at the desktop and wonder if they've bought a "My First Computer".

Re:No, really?

[Chandon Seldon]

Wait, what?

The desktop that they're showing in the screenshots (Enlightenment + Some File Manager + Some Dock App) is as full featured as any common desktop system today, and it should be able to compete at bling as well. Going with XFCE probably would have been better-integrated, but to noob users this system will look as good as a Mac (and thus *look* better than Vista).

Re:No, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Feature-wise, Enlightenment beats KDE and Gnome in a lot of ways. It's polish and stability and an actual official E17 release that's missing. The strange part is using a pre-alpha desktop.

Re:No, really?

[CronoCloud]

e17 is beta mostly, it was the 16.9999foo releases that were alpha. I've got a minimal e17 build on this thing, installed it to test it out. Works pretty well, but I don't use it because fluxbox works well enough for me.

More "responsive" than Vista

[192939495969798999]

I have a Mac Classic maxed out to 4 MB of RAM that is "more responsive" than vista. It's also got a ~8" black and white built in monitor, so it has some restrictions, but talk about smooth response! Not everything can be solved with RAM and CPU. Some problems must be solved with good system design.

Re:More "responsive" than Vista

[Gothmolly]

Aren't you the guy who was trying to copy a 17 MB file from 1 folder to another, while running NT 4 ?

Re:More "responsive" than Vista

[192939495969798999]

Yeah, I've done that a few times per some requirements at work, but with much larger and more numerous files... I wouldn't recommend it.

Re:More "responsive" than Vista

[martalli]

Well, if you're looking for just "more responsive than Vista", I could include my 32MB 486SX machine running Windows for Workgroups. Or my old 640kb 286 machine running DOS and wordperfect. Bloat encroachment has really done a number on responsiveness of our computers. My new core 2 duo laptop hardly feels more responsive than my much older 486SC did. It seems the only thing that really benefits from the better hardware is tasks like seti or folding at home.

Walmart has had them for years

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought two Microtel computers from Walmart with Linux in roughly 2002 for $199 each. One with Lindows and the other with Lycoris (sp?). They were both AMD Duron 1.3Ghz, 128MB ram, LG cdrom, MSI Motherboard with onboard Via chipsets. My kids had them in their bedrooms for about 3 years and had various distros on them, mainly Mandrake. I put 512 ram in each one though. Both are still going to this day. One of them is now running Monowall as my home firewall and an in-law has the other one.

unacceptably low-end?

[coyote-san]

Unacceptably low-end for modern software? Huh? I do some development at home, but other than that nearly all of my time is spent either reading email or surfing the web. Neither is particularly heavy.

And I'm happy with my bottom-end MicroCenter PCs that cost under $300, even with the development work. I did double the memory to 1GB, but that was the only change for two years. (Last week I decided to add a low-end NVIDIA card.)

I'll grant you that it's not a great choice for playing movies, and would undoubtably suck as a game platform, but for a lot of people that system would easily satisfy their needs and is far more affordable than the crap I've seen pushed at the same market -- get a 'name brand' pc for only $19.99/week for a year!

So is it for everyone? No. Is it a good choice for a lot of people? Yes.

Re:unacceptably low-end?

[timeOday]

Are you sure it's not fine for playing movies? I have a 1.6 GHz laptop (IBM T40). When playing movies, the CPU slows down to only 600 MHz (which is the minimum it can go) because that's all it needs.

Re:unacceptably low-end?

[Alpelopa]

I concur, but even more so :-) What is it that consumers think they need an expensive computer for? The only consumer applications I've found needing anything faster than a PIII 933 with a mid-range graphics card are action games and Google Earth. Using Craig's List (and a little patience waiting for the right deals) I've built several such Ubuntu machines for $50 - $60, including 512 MB RAM and 21" CRT monitor (yes, really!). They play full screen movies and online Adobe Flash games, they do graphics and audio editing, and even work quite adequately for LAMP development, assuming you don't have really large data sets to manipulate. What's more, kids seem to find Ubuntu as intuitive as Windows. I'd like to see some benchmarks for the VIA C-7 system Walmart is selling. If it's as least as good as a faster PIII with PC-133 RAM, then folks who can afford a television can afford a PC that does everything they need. Now lets see if we can't get broadband down below $300 per year.

Re:unacceptably low-end?

[Alpelopa]

I concur, but even more so :-) What is it that consumers think they need an expensive computer for?

The only consumer applications I've found needing anything faster than a PIII 933 with a mid-range graphics card are action games and Google Earth. Using Craig's List (and a little patience waiting for the right deals) I've built several such Ubuntu machines for $50 - $60, including 512 MB RAM and 21" CRT monitor (yes, really!).

They play full screen movies and online Adobe Flash games, they do graphics and audio editing, and even work quite adequately for LAMP development, assuming you don't have really large data sets to manipulate. What's more, kids seem to find Ubuntu as intuitive as Windows.

I'd like to see some benchmarks for the VIA C-7 system Walmart is selling. If it's as least as good as a faster PIII with PC-133 RAM, then folks who can afford a television can afford a PC that does everything they need.

Now lets see if we can't get broadband down below $300 per year.

Shit!

[iknownuttin]

Touted as a "green" machine, it has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive.

I paid $250+tax for a NetVista refurb with very similar specs - (Intel Celeron, everything else same.)

Re:Shit!

[Workaphobia]

> "Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software."

Damnit, those are better than my specs*. Although I'm using KDE just fine.

* At least, if we accept the clockspeed war mentality. AMD K7 Sempron 1.2 GHz, via chipset.

Where's the Ubuntu troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

And queue the denigrating remarks from our invading alien troll UbunutuDupe in 3... 2... 1...

Re:Where's the Ubuntu troll?

[morgan_greywolf]

And queue the denigrating remarks from our invading alien troll UbunutuDupe in 3... 2... 1... UbuntuDupe is on vacation this month. I think he left El "Linuzzz" Lobo in charge.

What's that bar at the bottom of the screenshot

[wile_e_wonka]

The bottom of the screenshot shows some type of application launcher or something. Does anyone know what that is exactly? I'm still looking for something stable to work as my "RKLauncher" for my Ubuntu setup.

Re:What's that bar at the bottom of the screenshot

[Constantine XVI]

You're looking for avant-window-navigator. Be warned that it won't work without Compiz running.

Re:What's that bar at the bottom of the screenshot

[the plant doctor]

Probably an iBar, it is e17 after all. It runs as a module in e17 so I don't think it will work like the old Engage used to which had an application and module version both.

Desktop in screen shots.

[iknownuttin]

What's the desktop shown in the screen shots?

Re:Desktop in screen shots.

[Anonymous Coward]

enlightenment.org
other neat stuff (animated backgrounds/icons and themes) for Enlightenment can be found at get-E.org

Many thanks for the troll rating, guys

[SlappyBastard]

I didn't say Linux sucks. I said Via sucks, and thereby is going to make this machine portray Linux as sucking. But, whatever. Enjoy being thoughtlessly reactionary.

Re:Many thanks for the troll rating, guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Then next time post something with content, instead of something that looks like a troll :(

anyone else think this is odd?

[wizardforce]

did anyone else find this part curious:

The variant of Linux on the gPC is called gOS and is derived from the popular Ubuntu variant. It's heavily oriented toward Google's Web sites and online applications, like YouTube, Gmail and the company's word processing program, all of which can be used only when the computer is connected to a broadband line. The PC comes with a dialup modem, but gOS doesn't support it. So most users likely will get online other ways.

true, more and more people are using broadband but there are a lot of people who can't get it.

Re:anyone else think this is odd?

[Ohio Calvinist]

No Dial Up? I would venture a guess that "casual user" or the "cost conscientious" user who buys a $200 computer at Wal-Mart isn't going to drop $40/m for broadband when they can get NetZero for $9.95. Some people just want (and are happy with) the bare minimum. My parents are like this, I bought them a $500 IBM (Lenovo?) desktop with my employee discount and they still use the thing for dial-up. Mom uses loading time to rip CDs to her iPod (probably helps that she's known no diffrent.)

Can I watch CSpan on these?

[bogaboga]

In my situation, I can only be interested in these systems if I can watch CSPAN online and out of the box. Question is: Can I watch CSPAN on these boxes without much configuration? Hope so.

Re:Can I watch CSpan on these?

[Anonymous Coward]

It works perfectly using Mplayer Plug-in. I don't know about this gOS, but ubuntu has it in their package repositories, so it's only a one-click install. If the gOS people are smart, they'll offer it through their package manager.

Mini ITX

[spiritraveller]

The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability. What would a tiny case cost, and does this thing need loud fans? Might be a good deal for a small-footprint device if you can get a smaller case for cheap.

Hardware makers doing things badly.

[Zombie Ryushu]

Will the hardware makers do what they have to to make sure the project fails by installing the worst software Linux has to offer and a broken configuration like they usually do?

Re:Hardware makers doing things badly.

[Anonymous Coward]

They always pre-install a bunch of crap on windows that adds a shit load of time to the start-up time, why wouldn't they do it to Linux also?

Quiz

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Linux but hate big evil megacorps like Wal*mart. Who do I do?

Garbage hardware requirements

[crush]

It has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software.

Anyone that things that the above specs are unacceptably low-end had better specify exactly what software they're considering running: weather simulations? 3-d compositing of movies? factoring Mersenne primes?

There is no problem running Firefox on a 500MHz CPU with 256Mb of RAM. You can even run a full-featured office suite such as Abiword on it. This hardware inflation for mundane tasks is insane.

Re:Garbage hardware requirements

[nonos]

Sorry but Abiword is only a word processor, not an office suite, and is not full-featured...

Re:Garbage hardware requirements

[crush]

True. s/Abiword/KOffice/ or you can use Abiword with Agnubis and Gnumeric

Re:Garbage hardware requirements

[dook43]

I disagree that Firefox "runs without problems" on a 500MhzCPU with 256MB of RAM. I consider its performance unacceptable. Good game Flash.

Re:Garbage hardware requirements

[crush]

Explain. I'm actually running it on a 466Mhz Celeron with 192Mb of RAM here. Please specify your problems.

Re:Garbage hardware requirements

[Azuma Hazuki]

I don't know what the author is on about, but I've been able to run KDE 3.5.x on a P3 450 MHz with 128 MB of RAM. It takes a while to load things, but it's nice and responsive once it does. Granted, I installed the kdebase package, so I didn't get such essentials of life as a chemistry-tutoring program or a full-featured real-time astronomy suite, but it runs and runs well. ...plus I dolled it up to look like Vista with KBFX and have gotten some really *strange* looks from people who walk by and see the case...

Re:Garbage hardware requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

factoring Mersenne primes?

Factoring primes (Mersenne or otherwise) is surprisingly easy...

Re:Garbage hardware requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree that Firefox "runs without problems" on a 500MhzCPU with 256MB of RAM. I consider its performance unacceptable.

Runs fine on my 500Mhz 256MB Athlon system (under Fedora 7/Gnome) if it's the only memory intensive application running. Yes, the initial load is very slow (30+ secs) but after that it's as fast as the websites/connection speed allows it to be.

Re:Garbage hardware requirements

[moderatorrater]

Firefox ran better than any other program on my 667 p3 with 128 megabytes of ram.

Re:Garbage hardware requirements

[dook43]

It's slow. I have a Thinkpad with a 533 Celeron and 192. Performance is unacceptably bad on just about any JS-enabled website.

first, let's kill the all the developers.

[mcmonkey]

the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers

Not to go off on a rant but my #1 pet peeve with software, especially anything from Microsoft, is all the hardware gains of the past 20 years are lost of bad software. Whether due to bad design (feature bloat) or bad execution, Vista and MS Office on current consumer hardware aren't any more responsive than Win 3 and Word or AmiPRO or whatever was running back in the day.

There was a /. story recently linking to a web log article about security analysis. The author, an employee of Microsoft, made a ridiculously inane comment about developers responding to users' requests. Really made me want to kick the guy in the nads. Does he really think users want to upgrade to faster CPUs and larger hard drives to benefit developers rather than themselves?

When MS Office 2k7 was in beta and the PR push was on for the new menu system, I read an analysis by MS of MS Office apps and their menus over the years. The space taken up by menu bars was listed as number of pixels and as a percentage of the typical screen size. The message was, although menus had grown in absolute size, the percentage of the typical screen had stayed the same. Like that was a good thing.

For the obligatory automotive analogy, would people take advantage of the improvements in engine design, lighter materials, etc. by buying large trucks rather than getting improved fuel efficiency with cars of the same size?

Nevermind.

Re:first, let's kill the all the developers.

[sqrt(2)]

Something I'd like to point out. This is true at least for the limited number of computers I work with at home, Office 2007 loads faster on XP than Office 2003 does. Word and excel open almost instantly, it amazes me every time. On vista it's about the same however. I think the new menus make it easier to find things, but that's just personal preference. I hear a lot about people wanting to get the old styled ones back. I'd say the change hasn't been well received.

Re:first, let's kill the all the developers.

[Ours]

Your automotive analogy is actually quite correct. Engines are getting better and better. The problem is cars are getting more and more equipment and therefore weight more.
Top gear compared a VW Golf R32. Weight went double so power also had to double to compensate the equipment weight (heated seats and all that crap). So, more bloat, more power. I the end the energy consumption is maintained while the engines become more efficient.

Re:first, let's kill the all the developers.

[jollyreaper]

Not to go off on a rant but my #1 pet peeve with software, especially anything from Microsoft, is all the hardware gains of the past 20 years are lost of bad software. Whether due to bad design (feature bloat) or bad execution, Vista and MS Office on current consumer hardware aren't any more responsive than Win 3 and Word or AmiPRO or whatever was running back in the day. Case in point: there is little fundamentally different that I would be doing on a 2007 Vista business computer that I could not just as easily accomplish on a K62 350mhz machine from 1998. (or was it 99? Anyway, it's old.) I had that very machine, came with Win98. I upgraded it to Win2k and that sucker ran like a raped ape. Responsive, dependable, would get you on the net, word process, all the shit you'd expect of a computer. It could run the games of the day just fine. In an office environment, games and downloaded movies are not part of the equation so it would still kick ass for that.

Sure, the hardware is cheaper these days. Back in the day, it was understood that you had to pony up $2k just to get a monochrome PC and you were going to like it! Even into the 90's, the $2k rule seemed to hold. But now that machines are dirt cheap, you're right, they're still losing all those hardware gains to bloatware.

The problem I'm seeing is that there's just no effort being put towards rethinking the way software should operate, at least from the world of Mickeysoft. It's all incremental evolution, nothing revolutionary. You really have to look to Apple or open source for some real changes in the way computers operate, the user interfaces, etc. Just look at the shit Google is doing with a freakin' web browser. Gmail conversation threating is very cool and the search features kick the shit out of Outlook. Google's desktop search app utterly slays what came native with Windows and now Microsoft has been compelled to release their own app just to play catchup, something that should have already been in the OS in the first place!

When we get right down to it, Microsoft is in the same situation as EA's sports franchises. Office is Madden. Every year you're going to get a new Madden game whether you were wanting it or not. Ok, so the rosters have been updated, have there been any other real improvements? No, not really. But we're releasing another Madden, go buy it! Same with Office. Well, it's time to release another Office. Any compelling improvements that make what I've currently got look like junk? Nope. Now buy my shit!

Vista's greatest selling point right now is "Don't worry, we'll eventually be as functional as XP!" They'll get forced sales from people who cannot or don't know how to demand XP but little more than that. They're certainly not going to trigger an early upgrade cycle with this crap. And with the offerings from Apple and open source getting better and better, we're actually getting close to the day when a real migration could happen. This is a big change because a few years back, I thought talk of migration was still just wishful thinking, unrealistic. Now we're getting to the point where such a scenario becomes plausible, not immediately laughable. I think that's an important development. Microsoft is QWERTY -- people stick with it because it's what they know, not because it's better than the other options.

Re:first, let's kill the all the developers.

[r_jensen11]

For the obligatory automotive analogy, would people take advantage of the improvements in engine design, lighter materials, etc. by buying large trucks rather than getting improved fuel efficiency with cars of the same size? For your information, there is no way in HELL my penis can fit in a Ford Pinto. That is why I rotate between driving these Army-issued Humvees and Bigfoot.

Re:first, let's kill the all the developers.

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't actually have any real bearing on your actual point, but the biggest reason some of us stick with QWERTY--and Microsoft--isn't because it's what we've always used, but because it's what everybody else uses. On an average day, I'll do some work on 2-4 machines that I'm not the primary user of. I don't want to have to sit down at a computer and every time have to think, "okay, what OS / key layout am I using here?" Much easier to have a single default mindset.

Re:first, let's kill the all the developers.

[DamonHD]

I would say that people have squandered automotive production and engine efficiencies by buying bigger (and thus disproportionally wasteful) cars, such as 4x4s ("Chelsea Tractors") and SUVs even for urban driving.

This might be partly the "Rebound Effect": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7071463.stm

But I'm afraid a lot of it is just greed and showing off, by manufacturers and consumers.

So Windows bloat is probably not a unique effect, even though geeks might find it especially irritating.

Rgds

Damon

Re:first, let's kill the all the developers.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say that people have squandered automotive production and engine efficiencies by buying bigger (and thus disproportionally wasteful) cars, such as 4x4s ("Chelsea Tractors") and SUVs even for urban driving. I've been noticing a lot lately that a many of these damned vehicles now have some kind of metal grille over the headlights, and other parts of the front end. Apparently these pieces-of-shit were too light and aerodynamic from the factory, so something had to be done.

Goddamned idiots. SUV drivers should be dragged from their vehicles and beaten to death.

Re:first, let's kill the all the developers.

[smash]

Not to go off on a rant but my #1 pet peeve with software, especially anything from Microsoft, is all the hardware gains of the past 20 years are lost of bad software. Whether due to bad design (feature bloat) or bad execution, Vista and MS Office on current consumer hardware aren't any more responsive than Win 3 and Word or AmiPRO or whatever was running back in the day.

Granted, somewhat. However, we now have a lot more featureful software now. And yes, some of the features may seem like cruft that is not required, but i think the software library we now have would be a lot more barren without it.

The user interface is "fast enough". I click start, and within 1/2 sec, i get a start menu. I don't have any appreciable wait.

What counts is what the software can do, and in that respect, we're still far beyond what was possible in the 1990s with 386s running Windows 3. Go try and encode (hell, even play) dvds with a box running hardware and software from 1990.

If everyone was still coding in hand optimised assembler, without any libraries provided in the OS for common tasks, you would simply not have the software we have today.

Wave goodbye to your 3d games - there would be no standard way of talking to the hardware. Hell, back in 1993, before DirectX, even superVGA games were rare, because there was no reliable way of even doing such simple things as setting screen resolution to say 640x480 256 colour, without resorting to VESA which not every card supported properly, and was a pain in the arse to program. Sure, I guess you could have tried to program an SVGA game with Windows 3.1, but really - the performance just wasn't there.

The old argument applies - hardware is cheap, and gets cheaper. Programmer time is expensive, and gets more so with inflation. If you're wasting programmer time on re-writing and optimising in a low level language (as opposed to just using a good algorithm) you better have a good business case for it.

Conflict of Ideals

[digitaldc]

A $200 Linux PC at Walmart, I can't tell whether to be happy that it actually being sold? or to be sad that it is being sold by the biggest corporation in the world. :(

gOS

[_14k4]

I wonder how well it would fare with Gutsy? How often is gOS updated?

I think this is good for say, Grandma, who will only want to get online and read her email and send a million forwards. Throw edubuntu on it and maybe it will be a good platform for children, as well.

Re:gOS

[nolife]

How often is gOS updated?

Well, apparently their web site is not even up yet
http://www.thinkgos.com/index.html

Right now, it states "Website coming 9am, November 1, 2007" but none of the links work.
I did find this though:

gOS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
I am not familiar with that license but it does have a really long name.

Re:gOS

[Nimey]

I just can't understand why they'd use *this* instead of plain Ubuntu Gutsy. It's got Google apps integrated, but that and Enlightenment 17 (is that even beta yet?) seem to be the only differences.

Re:gOS

[compro01]

I am not familiar with that license but it does have a really long name.

it's one of the creative commons family of licenses.

more details here.

Re:gOS

[DragonWriter]

gOS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
I am not familiar with that license but it does have a really long name.

So is it Linux-based or not? Because if it is Linux, I suspect they are going to run into trouble distributing under a license that is not the GPL.

Re:gOS

[crotherm]

According to this, wikipedia claims it is a Ubuntu 7.10 based OS with enlightenment as the WM. It is being optimized to run Google apps and other web 2.0 stuff.

Want

[kurtis25]

I want one.... I want to see if it is actually usable. Does my thumb drive work, my printer, my camera, my mouse and keyboard. Or do I have to drop another couple hundred dollars buying all new components. If everything I own works and the software is good, I don't mind Google docs and use it more than Word. I would guess the big hurdle is the Ipod. My folks would be fine with this PC but the Ipod obstacle stands in the way. I think it's a good idea I may consider but it may be in front of it's time. If the Gos is available for download I may just try that instead.

Linux drivers?

[peter303]

Fewer than PCs. Many vendors dont bother. Not impossible to write your own for Open Linux, but maybe not cost-effective. (Linus got started because he couldnt afford UNIX or Windows.)

Re:Linux drivers?

[Gothmolly]

You've never heard of MythTV, with a UID of 12292 ?

Re:Linux drivers?

[AJWM]

With a UID of 12292, and he's talking about "Open Linux", he probably hasn't touched the stuff in years. Open Linux was the name of Caldera's (remember them? they became The SCO Group, dropped their Linux business, and are now in bankruptcy) distro back around the turn of the millenium.

Re:Linux drivers?

[Wizy]

Low UID does not imply intelligence... oh wait...

Modem Doesn't Work

[SevenHands]

So the computer contains an internal modem (probably the software driven winmodem variety), and the OS does not support it. This is quite unfortunate. A complete blunder in my opinion. I could see a small, but significant portion of customers on dialup viewing the specs and figuring it'd be a good purchase, only to find that it doesn't work out of the box.

Re:Modem Doesn't Work

[Ours]

Why the hell would they do that? It would be stupid design.
So don't state it like its sort of a fact.

Re:Modem Doesn't Work

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the article says so you retard.

Re:Modem Doesn't Work

[SevenHands]

Foot meet mouth!! Read the article. You might just stop yourself from looking like an ass next time...

NEWS FLASH

[Anonymous Coward]

On the advice of the Nigerian president, Wal-mart has unexpectedly decided to sell XP with the $200 systems instead of Linux.

Enlightenment *is* fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Just want to tout the advantages of Enlightenment(DR16) as a window manager. It only uses 4M of ram, is very light on CPU, yet is very good at what it does. It also happens to be easily tweakable to fit your particular needs and preferences. No it's not a "Desktop Environment", but it's pretty close. Certainly a bit more featureful than your average window manager.

Did I mention it was fast? Good.

It comes to me as no surprise that a low-end machine running E can be more responsive than Vista and other heavy-weight software like Gnome or KDE.

Re:Enlightenment *is* fast

[cycoj]

Actually from the screenshots it looks like the pc is running e17 (DR17) which is still fast. But quite a lot more featureful and shiny than e16.

Re:Only terrorists and hackers use Linux

[Nar Matteru]

No thats the year of the gnaa (or whatever else you're part of, same thing in my book tho)

A little work...

[Shivetya]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everex

Their site http://www.everex.com/

review of a $600 version from the awhile ago http://www.laptopmag.com/Review/Everex-StepNote-LM7WE.htm

I haven't found many reliability mentions... but you can dig more yourself

$200 is practically chump change for many

Re:A little work...

[ByOhTek]

I was more concerned with personal use and oppionions, than what would be found in the first two links. Those are obvious, easy to find, and not terribly useful for ascertaning quality and reliability.

The third link is nice though.

Re:A little work...

[dnormant]

"$200 is practically chump change for many"

And that's going to put a lot of "unsophisticated" users on the Internet. This will give balckhats an incentive to target Linux for their bots/viruses/zombies.

Maybe Congress will fix it.

Re:A little work...

[ByOhTek]

Maybe Congress will fix it.

Do you really want congress to illegalize the use of Linux? That doesn't strike me as the best idea/solution in the world...

Re:A little work...

[dnormant]

"Illeagalizing" Linux would be stupid and was nowhere near my meaning.

Re:A little work...

[ByOhTek]

maybe so, but can you think of any other "fix" that wouldn't be too complex for congress? They aren't exactly the brightest bunch on the planet...

computer limits choice

[LM741N]

Doesnt' seem like you can do much with a computer like that as far as OS and software goes. I mean everything has to be binary. Do you think it would provide acceptable performance for lets say FreeBSD, where compilation is the name of the game? Try "make buildworld" and see what happens.

Re:computer limits choice

[moderatorrater]

It's running on top of Ubuntu, so you could easily compile anything you want on it.

Re:computer limits choice

[smash]

Do you think it would provide acceptable performance for lets say FreeBSD, where compilation is the name of the game?

Yes. Given that I have run "make buildworld" on way crappier machines, and still have a couple of Pentium 2s running FreeBSD for various tasks (yes, they're out of date and will be replaced when they fail - they've been up without maintenance since 2002, when i left the company. I'm going back in 2 weeks tho, so will be good to see them again :D), I see no issue.

From memory, make buildworld took an hour or more to complete on that class of machine, but it's not like you have to take the machine offline to run that.

And, you don't need to run make buildworld anyway with FreeBSD. In fact, you don't need to compile at all really. You may need to compile the kernel if there's an obscure networking feature you need (for a server), but for desktop use, just load the appropriate kernel modules, and install packages with pkg_add -r (a large number of the ports are available precompiled as packages :))

A lot of people assume that because FreeBSD has ports that they're an essential part of the system. They're not - you can quite happily live with extremely minimal compilation, if any.

Marketing Madness

[rueger]

Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software. By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers.

You're taking an underpowered machine, with a non-standard desktop, OS and software, and selling it to what is likely the least tech knowledgeable market that you can find.

a) Sell crappy Linux box to unsupecting mark.
b) Mark can't figure out why it isn't like every other computer
c) Mark can't make $9.99 computer game install
d) Mark can't make MS Word document open.
e) Profit?

Ever consider that there was a reason why Wal-Mart's last cheapo Linux PC has been "out of stock" for so long? It's because they can't sell them without having them returned.

Re:Marketing Madness

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever consider that there was a reason why Wal-Mart's last cheapo Linux PC has been "out of stock" for so long? It's because they can't sell them without having them returned.

I bought one, an Everex, it's sitting downstairs running Astaro like a champ right now. $300 for a 30W firewall with VPN and content filtering. Sold.

Re:Marketing Madness

[the_womble]

a) Sell crappy Linux box to unsupecting mark.

Yes,because the buyers are really going to be expecting the best hardware avaiable for $200. They will expect something that works reasonably and is good value for a bottom end price.

b) Mark can't figure out why it isn't like every other computer

Given how pretty Enlightenment looks, and given the public's liking for eye-candy, most buyers are going to think"hey, this is cool". Screenshot of this PC's default theme here.

c) Mark can't make $9.99 computer game install

$200 hardware is obviously aimed at gamers

d) Mark can't make MS Word document open.

Why not? I have never had a problem opening and MS Word document on any Linux distro I have tried, click on it in the file manager. You do not even have to install any additional software, what you need is in the default install - unlike a good many cheap Windows PCs.

e) Profit?

At that price, very likely. Margins will be very low given the volumes Wal-Mart could potentially shift they do not need to be high.

Re:Marketing Madness

[kseise]

I bought one of the $200.00 Microtel / Xandros machines that they used to carry. I bought it, wiped Xandros off, installed XP, and played the Battlefield series pretty well on it.

It has evolved in the past 2.5 years, but it still looks the same, so my wife has no idea.

Was - Sempron 2200 with 512 MD RAM and 40 GB drive.
IS NOW - Athlon FX 62 with 2 GB, twin 40 GB drives in Raid 0 and a 500 GB data drive with an nVidia 6800 GS card.

It lasted about a year and a half before I upgraded the original graphics card. The cheap little machines are great for learning and for Granny type use. Motivated users will know how to upgrade and learn from the experience.

Re:Marketing Madness

[r3m0t]

$9.99 computer game. Don't think "gamer". Think "lame copy of tetris". Or think of the stuff off gamehippo.com.

Re:Marketing Madness

[yelvington]

$9.99 computer game. Don't think "gamer". Think "lame copy of tetris". Or think of the stuff off gamehippo.com.

You're thinking like a Windows user.

With Linux, the "lame copy of tetris" is included in the distribution, and it's free, along with clones of a couple of dozen other games, so there's little reason to be prowling through the $9.99 closeout bin at Wal-Mart.

And since Ubuntu includes Wine, there's a possibility that the $9.99 game will run anyway. Maybe even a higher probability than with Vista.

Re:Marketing Madness

[rueger]

Yes,because the buyers are really going to be expecting the best hardware avaiable for $200. They will expect something that works reasonably and is good value for a bottom end price.

Joe Wal-mart shopper figures a computer is a computer is a computer. They just figure it's cheap 'cause it's Wal-Mart. He or she expects it to work just like his neighbour's PC.

Given how pretty Enlightenment looks, and given the public's liking for eye-candy, most buyers are going to think"hey, this is cool".

Joe Wal-Mart shopper will just get confused because it's not the same as every other computer he has sat in front of. Think "VCR flashing 12:00" type of user.

$200 hardware is obviously aimed at gamers

Joe Wal-Mart shopper buys games at Costco and Staples from a big bin in the aisle. Wal-mart Linux box won't run it. He or she doesn't know or care why, just knows that his neighbour's PC runs it fine.

I have never had a problem opening and MS Word document on any Linux distro I have tried, click on it in the file manager.

OK, refine that. It opens the Word doc from work, but all of the formatting is screwed up. Or someone e-mails him a Powerpoint that won't work.

In a Windows centric world you simply cannot drop an underpowered, low spec Linux box on a not tech savvy group and expect them to do anything but return it. It's not a question of whether or not Linux is good, or better, it's a question of whether it does what they expect it to do.

if it doesn't do what the end user wants, in a way that they know how to use, then it's broken.

Re:Marketing Madness

[owlstead]

Use flash. Seriously, who still buys crappy games on CD-ROM? You can get crappy games for free with a bit of ads. Besides, there are a few nice games included with Linux nowadays. As mentioned, including tetris (ugh, why are words like "tetris" never included in standard dictionaries?)

Re:Marketing Madness

[dbIII]

With the right desktop theme Enlightenment behaves like MS windows, a mac, an Irix desktop or whatever - it's a window manager guys so it's mostly about where the widgets are on the corners of the windows. The earlier poster is probably thinking of the gnome and kde apps which can still run and are seperate from the window manager.

Re:Marketing Madness

[amohat]

At that price, very likely. Margins will be very low given the volumes Wal-Mart could potentially shift they do not need to be high. Don't forget the accessories! The box might be a wash, but monitors, mouses, webcams (one can only hope) etc could put it in the black.

Re:Marketing Madness

[acidbass]

actually, the ms word doc would open under OpenOffice.

Re:Marketing Madness

[the_womble]

He or she expects it to work just like his neighbour's PC.

It will, for a naive users' usage.

Joe Wal-Mart shopper will just get confused because it's not the same as every other computer he has sat in front of.

1) It does not seem to be holding Apple back - and they are not selling only to Apple loyalists or sophisticated user either. 2) That is precisely the kind of user who loves eye candy.

Joe Wal-Mart shopper buys games at Costco and Staples from a big bin in the aisle.

1) Most adult users do not play games at all. Only kids and nerds play games. 2) How many games will they buy given that the PC will probably have a bunch of games installed, and a whole lot more can be added, for free and immediately, from "add/remove programs".

OK, refine that. It opens the Word doc from work, but all of the formatting is screwed up. Or someone e-mails him a Powerpoint that won't work.

So you really think that one is several thousand MS office docs having slightly odd formatting or a macro that does not work is a deal-breaker for home users? That can happen even is you are using MS Office (if you have different fonts installed, or a different version of MS Office from the other person, for example)

They probably will never come across this problem. I (and my wife) have been used Linux for six years, my father for three years, and other people I know for shorter times (me and three others for work, not home, usage). Between us, we have encountered one MS Office file that cannot be opened satisfactorily by Open Office - and I think that is actually some sort of malware (it had an Windows executable extension for a start).

duh

[dropadrop]

Wow, that sounds dead cheap looking at the components. I would have use for a very silent computer at home, and those specs would be fine. Too bad I'm living in Finland, here the processor + motherboard combo cost over 200 at the cheapest place I can find!

I bought one of these Wal-Mart Linux PCs

[KWTm]

I ordered a Wal-Mart Linux PC. I'm using it for a backup server at home right now.

This was back in 2002 or 2003. It was $200, only available by mail-order, and came with a CD-ROM drive and single hard disk (20GB?). I picked up a crummy CRT at the local second-hand computer store and started exploring Linux. I replaced the hard drive with a removable hard drive bracket.

It took me a while to figure out that the CD reader had subtle errors (after 3 different distributions of Linux failed to install) and replaced that too. The thing was, the smaller box (is that called mini-ITX?) would only fit the very smallest CD drives, and both my new CD RW and the removable hard drive bracket protruded out the front in a rather ugly way.

The thing came with Lindows (as it was called at the time). I tried it for 10 minutes and then replaced it with "Pink Tie" Linux, then Mandrake 8.1, then LibraNet Linux. (I tried Debian, too, but that "dselect" thing is way too cryptic.)

Looks like Wal-Mart is back with more PC's for the people. That's great. It will bring more visibility to Ubuntu, and Linux in general. And that's the point of the whole thing: to let Linux have more visibility so that manufacturers, and people in general, won't say, "Hey, we don't have to make our video player compatible with Linux because nobody uses Linux."

Re:I bought one of these Wal-Mart Linux PCs

[Hatta]

Next time you give debian a try, use aptitude instead of dselect. It navigates just like lynx, so it's pretty intuitive.

Re:I bought one of these Wal-Mart Linux PCs

[u-235-sentinel]

Looks like Wal-Mart is back with more PC's for the people. That's great. It will bring more visibility to Ubuntu, and Linux in general. And that's the point of the whole thing: to let Linux have more visibility so that manufacturers, and people in general, won't say, "Hey, we don't have to make our video player compatible with Linux because nobody uses Linux."

I was just thinking this might make a great mythtv frontend system for streaming video content over my home network. I'm thinking perhaps replace it with Ubuntu 7.04 as I understand it comes with a Ubuntu knock off...

Been trying to get on the walmart web site the article linked. It's down for maintenance during the day again? Grrrr... I'll keep checking back. I'm curious if this is the silver bullet for my environment I've been looking for.

The alternative was building a custom box for about $400 to run the front end mythtv piece. Looking forward to this :D

Oh and I think it's great to see Linux getting more and more press as a desktop solution. Happy Linux Desktop user here since 1999! Now if we could only get the CounterStrike Source client to work 100% I'd be really happy :D

Re:I bought one of these Wal-Mart Linux PCs

[cycoj]

You might also want to have a look at rage. A multimedia frontend raster from enlightenment has written. As the pc seems to have the necessary libraries for e17 already installed it should be not much of a problem to also compile rage.

$240 PC at Newegg.com

[digitaldc]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883114030
Here is one of your cheapest alternatives on the market

Brand eMachines
Model W3609
Recommended Usage Home / Home Office
Processor Intel Celeron D 356(3.33GHz)
Processor Main Features 64 bit Processor
Cache Per Processor 512KB L2 Cache
Memory 512MB DDR2 533
Hard Drive 120GB SATA 7200rpm
Optical Drive 1 DVD±RW 16x Multiformat Dual-Layer Optical Drive
Graphics Intel GMA 950 Up to 224MB Shared Video Memory
Audio 6-channel (5.1) high-definition audio
Ethernet Intel 10/100Mbps Ethernet LAN
Speaker Amplified Stereo Speakers (USB-Powered)
Keyboard Standard multifunction keyboard
Mouse 2-button wheel mouse
Operating System Windows Vista Home Basic

Re:$240 PC at Newegg.com

[Anomalyst]

Actually $264 with cheapest shipping.

Re:$240 PC at Newegg.com

[sootman]

Recommended Usage Home / Home Office
Processor Intel Celeron D 356(3.33GHz)
Processor Main Features 64 bit Processor
Cache Per Processor 512KB L2 Cache
Memory 512MB DDR2 533
Hard Drive 120GB SATA 7200rpm

It always kills me to read the specs on a site like Dell.com and see all these machines described as "suitable for web browsing, email..." When I went to Siggraph in 1998, PII/400s were the new hotness and all the kickass machines that ran all the 3D apps had MAYBE 16 MB video cards. Today, they make it sound like a 3 GHz machine is usable only if you're a complete simpleton and will never have more than 2 apps open at once. Unbelievable.

Re:$240 PC at Newegg.com

[evilviper]

Here is one of your cheapest alternatives on the market

Not by a LONG SHOT...

How about a 1.7GHz P4, 128MB DDR, 40GB HDD, DIRT CHEAP ($70 shipped): http://www.accurateit.com/details.asp?iid=464

How about a NEW Sempron 3200+ system with 256MB DDR2, 40GB HDD, and built-in GeForce 6100 for $143. You can even customize it, and with similar specs to the NewEgg systems, it's still well-under $240 but still NOT a refurb like the newegg system: http://www.ascendtech.us/customkititems.asp?kc=DTSEMP300051216

This on is just a bit more: http://www.pc-infinity.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=P&Product_Code=PW08320025640&Category_Code=

Hell, just go through the PC section of pricewatch and you'll find a few dozen similar... much cheaper than Newegg.

Re:$240 PC at Newegg.com

[east coast]

It always kills me to read the specs on a site like Dell.com and see all these machines described as "suitable for web browsing, email..."
Today, they make it sound like a 3 GHz machine is usable only if you're a complete simpleton and will never have more than 2 apps open at once.

Actually, they're letting Joe Sixpack know that they don't have to run out and buy a 2000 USD PC for pr0n surfing and e-mail.

You wouldn't believe the number of people I know who have owned a PC for a few years but can't tell you what the amount of memory, HD capacity or what processor is in the machine. This normally comes up in conversation since they're also standing there with a Dell/Best Buy/WalMart ad and asking if a certain PC would be able to do everything they do with their existing five year old machine. These people who don't understand the technology need this confirmation.

It's still somewhere between voodoo and rocket science to them. It's pathetic and sad but it still a fact. Dell knows this as well as anyone here, they know their customer and putting these laughable* notations on the ad is what it sometimes takes to make a sale without having someone "buying a computer for the grandkids" tugging at the sales reps ear for 20 minutes affirming that they're making the right choice. The faster the sale the less it costs in overhead.

* Laughable to us but this is serious business for people who average about 100-200 USD per year on PC hardware. These are the same people who consider 150 USD laser printers an expensive waste in the face of their fine Canon ink jet that costs 40 USD + another 40 USD for each ink cartridge.

Re:$240 PC at Newegg.com

[vosester]

don't agree with vista's EULA,
get a refund,
install linux

properly works out a better deal

Re:$240 PC at Newegg.com

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this company X-Infinity I used to buy from them every week when I had my business. They have best prices

Re:$240 PC at Newegg.com

[El_Oscuro]

Years ago, I got Battlezone for my old PII/64MB running Windows 98. The graphics were absolutely amazing for the time, and still look good enough to be mistaken for a much more modern game (I still run it on XP). Its funny, but I pretty much use my computer for the exact same tasks as I did 10 years ago, yet it seems to run no faster than on those old PII systems.

Re:$240 PC at Newegg.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Downside: No VIA C7 processor. This Celeron D will eat you out of house and home. Not to mention being inefficient at AES encryption.

lean Enlightment .. ha!

[kharchenko]

By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives

I remember when Enlightment was taking heat for being a resource hog, compared to normal window managers such as WindowMaker.
But Gnome and (to a lesser degree) KDE managed to make it look lean. Not only they are bloated, but the feature set, flexbility and graphics quality is complete crap. They're rapidly approaching locked-down, dumbed-down level of XP or Vista as far as window manager functionality is concerned. Way to compete with "the man" by copying the most annoying aspects! Oh, and kudos to aforementioned PC manufacturer for recognizing this.

Re:lean Enlightment .. ha!

[smash]

If you want to compare window managers, compare E to KWM (kde's window manager component)or whatever WM it is that gnome ships with now (i've lost track to be honest, last time i remember what it was, was sawfish).

Gnome/KDE include a hell of a lot more than just a window manager.

HW Requirements and Warcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a friend who is looking for a PC in this price range, but wants to be able to play World of Warcraft.
With these specs, will this system be able to handle it through Wine?
I suspect we would at least upgrade to 1GB of RAM, but I'm not sure how much overhead the emulation will add since I am unfamiliar with the C7 CPU.
Any thoughts? Is this even in the ballpark?

Re:HW Requirements and Warcraft

[mrgrey]

no

Re:HW Requirements and Warcraft

[compro01]

AFAIK, that proc would seem to be roughly equal to a 1ghz p3.

can't find any info at all on the video chip, though i presume it would be a via chrome or something.

though the name is Wine Is Not an Emulator. in my experiance, windows apps on wine generally run at equal or better speed than under windows.

overall, not enough information available. i'd personally say it would likely work, in a manner of speaking, though likely with everything turned down to the absolute minimum settings, but even then would likely have problems in intensive situations (city rush hour, raids, etc.)

bottom line : it would likely work, but it doesn't seem like a good idea.

a better idea might be the computer this guy suggests, after the planned ram upgrade, maybe a better videocard, and tossing vista in favour of installing XP, (k/x/flux/whatever)ubuntu, or insert-your-favorite-linux-distro.

Re:HW Requirements and Warcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit to both of these posts.

Get this machine, drop in some more RAM and a reasonable nvidia card (say 7600 or so) and you're set.

WoW is /not/ resource intensive.

Re:HW Requirements and Warcraft

[orkysoft]

Since when do mini-ITX boards come with a PCI-e or even AGP slot?

Re:Conflict of Ideals

[SirLurksAlot]

What does it matter if Walmart is the one selling it? If it leads to more people using Linux I don't see the problem.

200 dollar sweet spot

[Danathar]

Jack Tramail of Atari and Commodore used to say that $200 is a sweet spot for consumers

"Computers for the Masses, not the classes"

Re:200 dollar sweet spot

[Kjella]

Has that been corrected for inflation? Seriously. At any rate it's rather meaningless beucase there's a market sweetspot like FPS/$ or GB/$ or whatever, then there's the "what do I need sweetspot". What good is a 500GB drive if you're the type of user that'll never hit the 20GB mark? Even if it's a lot cheaper *per gigabyte*.

Re:200 dollar sweet spot

[CronoCloud]

I have a saying inspired by that Jack Tramiel saying:

Linux for the masses, not just those who've taken programming classes.

Re:200 dollar sweet spot

[adolf]

Jack Tramail of Atari and Commodore used to say that $200 is a sweet spot for consumers

And we all know what happened to those two companies.

Yikes.

Re:200 dollar sweet spot

[Danathar]

Actually, I think it's a psychological sweet spot. Not adjusted for inflation.

Re:200 dollar sweet spot

[Danathar]

Well...it was'nt the price of the C-64 which killed Commodore, they died due to the greed and Evil of the CEO and CFO in the late 90's.

The $199 price point of the C-64 made it a smash hit.

But does it run Linux?

[TheDrewbert]

The advertisement doesn't even say that it runs Linux. It runs something called gOS. A quick spin over to gOS's website www.thinkgos.com reveals a mostly non-functional, incomplete site where not even the download link works and no mention of Linux is even made. Yes, I see the note about the site being ready November 1st at 9am. (presumably when the developer arrives to start the FTP upload). But it's 11:30am here on the east coast and I got nothing.

No Thanks, it's still Wal*Mart

[gosand]

It's coming from Wal*Mart - no thanks. I don't shop there because I don't agree with the way they do business.

I hate to say it - Thanks WalMart!

[TheBrutalTruth]

But thanks again WalMart. I am a VERY anti-WalMart person, but I appreciate their (for the wrong reasons, I'm sure) promotion of Linux based, cheap PC's over recent years. The more it's out there at a significantly lower cost, as long as the product does demonstrate to "Joe User" that he can use Linux for everyday tasks with confidence, the more widespread it will become. I hope.

yes, but

[aristolochene]

but does it run, oh, i see.

You forgot one...

[RealGrouchy]

More details at 11!

- RG>

Not outdated.

[LWATCDR]

"That machine running that software performs those functions just fine, despite being horribly outdated. "
No that isn't and outdated machine. It is a good tool.
Really a computer does everything you want it to do why bother upgrading?
Windows2000 is a good OS and is still getting security patches.
Why fix what isn't broken.

what about the hype!

[nilbog]

Wait, wait, wait. You can't just go and release a $200 computer. You have to hype it up for a few years first. Tell everyone its going to be $100 and get a bunch of corporate sponsors and generate tons of interest. Talk about how you're going to save the world with your $100 computer. THEN you can release it for $200.

Those selfish bastards at Wal*Mart think they can just walk up and release something like this? Ha!

A found PC

[mr micawber]

A couple of months ago, before my 2 ghz XP box went kaput, I would have judged this Wal Mart offering as anemic.

The backstory:
Trash in our neighborhood is picked up early Friday. I was out for a 'round the block smoke-walk late one Thu night and came upon an old HP Vectra VL on the curb with the other trash. I thought "what the hell and loaded the heavy PC and keyboard onto my shoulder. When I got home, I plugged it in and found it to be a 333 mhz box with Win98, and it worked. I played around with it a little and then put it in hallway, where it became the favorite perch of Ernie (my cat).

A couple of months later the HD and mobo fried on my 2ghz XP box. I had everything replicated and backed up on a USB drive, so I saved my data. I put Ubuntu on the Vectra and it runs great for a machine with such out of date specs. Of course it is slower and less reponsive than my original PC, but there are some functions (changing the desktop resolution, for example) that are considerably snappier even on the outdated equipment.

I have installed Linux/X on several machines through the years but the latest install from Ubuntu (7.04, now 7.1) was by far the smoothest. If I hadn't lost my XP box, I wouldn't have appreciated what can be accomplished on an older system with better software.

Wal Mart is evil, but I might just have to go over to the dark side and grab that $200 PC.

Re:A found PC

[generic]

I love recycling old systems, I have a 486 laptop that I use as a wireless bridge to get connectivity to my basement. Runs Debian slowly but passes packets back and forth pretty well. diabolic:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 4 model : 8 model name : 486 DX/4 stepping : 0 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme bogomips : 49.76 diabolic:~# uname -a Linux diabolic 2.4.27-3-386 #1 Wed Dec 6 00:38:33 UTC 2006 i486 GNU/Linux diabolic:~# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 26120 25436 684 0 2456 8144 -/+ buffers/cache: 14836 11284 Swap: 40152 3328 36824 diabolic:~#

OLPC is stupid to compete with Wal-Mart

[scottsk]

I said this all along: The OLPC might be okay as a giveaway in third-world countries who don't have any choice and will accept anything that might be useful technology. But OLPC is STUPID to compete in America with the low-end power of Wal-Mart. Just look at how Wal-Mart has found someone to make them a cheap, under $200 PC -- and remember Wal-Mart is making cheaper PCs all the time while the OLPC ones get more expensive -- that run a real version of Linux, not a strange non-standard operating system. What OLPC ought to do is just call off their project for a year, and then go talk to the same suppliers Wal-Mart is using and buy from them. Free enterprise has won this battle, while Negroponte is going around telling people that companies are "pissing on" him and trying to run Windows on the OLPC. I know people like to dis Wal-Mart, but this is one case where they have done something positive, getting cheap PCs into the hands of people who otherwise couldn't afford them.

Re:OLPC is stupid to compete with Wal-Mart

[DragonWriter]

I said this all along: The OLPC might be okay as a giveaway in third-world countries who don't have any choice and will accept anything that might be useful technology.

The OLPC is not mainly a giveaway, anywhere. It's an enterprise device designed to meet the neds of a particular industry, i.e., national education systems in the developing world. There are some "giveaway" projects, and some investigation of one government buying them for another, but the principal focus is selling them directly to the governments that would integrate them into their national education system.

But OLPC is STUPID to compete in America with the low-end power of Wal-Mart.

OLPC, despite the cries of some (including numerous slashdotters) who would like it to, is not competing in the American retail market. Sure, there is a limited fundraising effort in direct sales in the U.S. loosely analogous to, say, a PBS pledge drive that offers a gift with a specified donation, but no effort at mass retail sale of the XO in the U.S.

Just look at how Wal-Mart has found someone to make them a cheap, under $200 PC -- and remember Wal-Mart is making cheaper PCs all the time while the OLPC ones get more expensive -- that run a real version of Linux, not a strange non-standard operating system.

The XO has not gotten more expensive. The XO ended up more expensive than it was hoped to be. There is a difference. You can't get more expensive before you have an actual price, rather than a price goal.

The operating system of the XO is an equally real version of Linux.

What OLPC ought to do is just call off their project for a year, and then go talk to the same suppliers Wal-Mart is using and buy from them.

Why? What Wal*Mart is selling is more expensive than the XO and lacks many of the key features that were identified as essential to the XO project. Why does the existence of a product that is both more expensive and doesn't meet the goals of the XO project indicate that the OLPC project should abandon the suppliers it has and the highly specialized machine that it has developed?

Free enterprise has won this battle, while Negroponte is going around telling people that companies are "pissing on" him and trying to run Windows on the OLPC.

Your comments suggest that you imagine that there is a battle between OLPC and for-profit groups to make sub-$200 PCs that meet a need in the first-world retail market. There is not. While some of the technologies advanced through the OLPC project may eventually have some effect on the first world retail market (and, indeed, the project itself may have played a role in spurring the very demand that Wal*Mart and others are now meeting in that market), the market the OLPC project is addressing and the market this Wal*Mart product is targeting are completely different markets.

There are certainly efforts by for-profit companies to fight the OLPC for the kind of large-scale sales to public educational institutions in the developing world that the OLPC is targeting, particularly from hardware and software vendors for whom large-scale adoption of the XO in education might, in the long-run, pose a threat to their present market dominance. But those are completely unrelated to this Wal*Mart product.

Re:OLPC is stupid to compete with Wal-Mart

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it that hard to grasp the difference between a desktop and a laptop?

Re:OLPC is stupid to compete with Wal-Mart

[AlXtreme]

But OLPC is STUPID to compete in America with the low-end power of Wal-Mart.

Let's see, OLPC: One _Laptop_ Per Child? This article is about a PC. Without a monitor. Designed to offer Americans an alternative to PC's with the Microsoft Tax. OLPC is a laptop designed for kids in third world countries.

Maybe you'd like to rant against Oranges for not being an Apple next?

$400 Ultralight Linux laptop available from Newegg

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220244

It is a big deal because usually cheap laptops (win or linux) are big, bulky and VERY heavy. Here we have a cheap and at the same time ultralight laptop

Choices

[R2.0]

We want Linux to take over the World.
But we want the World to skip the Clueless n00b stage
And we don't want to make Linux too easy to use.

Pick any 2.

gOS Website

[Anonymous Cowhead]

Haven't seen anyone mention the OS distro website: http://www.thinkgos.com/

"An alternative OS with Google
Apps and other Web 2.0 apps
for the masses"

Also says "Website coming 9am, November 1, 2007", which is almost 10 minutes ago!

Returns

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder how many ppl will retun these after they get home and realize that it is not running that windows thing.

uh, did anyone else notice...

[friedman101]

http://www.thinkgos.com/index.html

"An alternative OS with Google Apps and other Web 2.0 apps for the masses"

So we have an unknown linux vendor shipping an OS filled with google applications and it's called gOS. Oh, and they got a deal with Walmart. Is this the elusive Google Os?

Re:uh, did anyone else notice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks more like a fanboy. One guy runs qOS and Faqly and is named by Wired as the spokesman for Everex. Another poster mentioned Everex being around in the '80s before being sold to a Taiwanese plastics company. What little of their page loads today says 1983-2007, suggesting the company resurrected the old trademark or someone bought it from them.

what?!?

[Deadplant]

"It has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software."

You've got to be f-ing kidding me.
That is nonsense. the author has been talking to sales people and/or the microsoft vista team.
That is double the spec you need for XP with office-like software and broadband Internet multimedia stuff.

The latest games and vista are the only "modern software" for which those specs are inadequate.
And that is only because games can always use more power and are thus coded for the latest and greatest equipment.
(I can't explain vista)

Re:what?!?

[evilviper]

That is double the spec you need for XP with office-like software and broadband Internet multimedia stuff.

NO. If it was an Intel/AMD CPU it would be double the spec for XP. With a 1.5GHz VIA CPU, it's well under the spec, and it's going to be quite slow.

The latest games and vista are the only "modern software" for which those specs are inadequate.

Try playing 1080 HD video on the system, and you're in for a very unpleasant surprise.

Re:what?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I am a great fan of VIAs CPUs, a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 is not near in performance to a 1.5Ghz Pentium 3, it is more likely similar to a 800 Mhz Pentium 3.

Re:what?!?

[smash]

So heaps of users were running Windows XP on 300mhz Celerons (or worse) with 128MB (or less) of ram back in 2002 in our dreams, right?

No, i wasn't one of those users, but I dealt with them. And for fairly low end work, they used to deal with it just fine.

Re:what?!?

[evilviper]

So heaps of users were running Windows XP on 300mhz Celerons (or worse) with 128MB (or less) of ram back in 2002 in our dreams, right?

I never said anything about it being impossible. I just said this system will be quite slow. With CPU speed, it's all a matter of degrees.

Re:what?!?

[dbIII]

Put the wrong antivirus software on there and 512MB is not nearly enough memory for a Windows XP machine now. Some of it appears to have become very memory hungry after updates.

Re:what?!?

[MikShapi]

Agreed, the author is a clueless idiot.

I resell miniITX/nanoITX kit. A slower fanless C7/1.2GHz runs XP perfectly fine. A 1.5GHz will run it even finer.
With 512MB? Give me a break. The guy has pro'lly heard about Via cpus from someone who knows even less, and has probably never seen the words EPIA, eden, luke, miniITX/nanoITX mentioned anywhere either.

It will even run vista quite happily, with the reservation of needing at least a gig of ram, and that the embedded GPU on via platforms - Unichrome chipsets of all sorts - do NOT support Aero. Other than that, run Vista on it to your heart's content.

In fact, its outright useless for gaming. Forget WoW. You'd have trouble running a 1999-era game on it.
Still, for that tiny niche market of three joes who don't game, this is a totally sweet PC. And for a few more dollars, they can get XP up and running on it.

Re:what?!?

[Deadplant]

Try mplayer. It will have CPU to spare.

Re:what?!?

[evilviper]

Try mplayer.

Haha!

It will have CPU to spare.

No. With MPEG-2 and perhaps MPEG-4, 1080 files will be playable, but there's absolutely no chance of playing WMV or h.264 files at 1080 on this system. In fact, I doubt it could keep up with WMV/h.264 files even at 720.

I'd buy them.

[Anonymous Coward]

At one client, I put a GQ3151 from Fry's on everyone's desk running Redhat/Fedora. Works great, since mostly they use telnet to the mainframe, web, OO, and E-mail. Since Fry's no longer sells Linux PC's, this would be a perfect replacement product for new/replacement systems.

Re:Only terrorists and hackers use Linux

[CatsupBoy]

The year of Linux on the desktop is never.

Uh... you spelled nigh wrong.

Motherboard specs?

[Ignorant Aardvark]

Anyone know the motherboard specifications for this computer? It seems to be just the thing I need, if it has a full-size PCI slot (not PCI Express). I guess I'll wait until Wal-Mart either gets a clue and posts full specifications on the product, or someone else gets one and reports on it. Because I'm not buying one until I'm sure it will actually be able to handle the task I need it for.

Re:Motherboard specs?

[asphaltjesus]

Another post suggests it's this box: http://www.everex.com/products/gc2500/gc2500.htm

No pci slot :(

not mail-order?; not new; user impressions

[bcrowell]

One interesting thing to note is that the language in the article implies that the computer will actually be on the shelf in stores. IIRC, previous cheap walmart linux PCs were only available by mail order.

Being able to buy a linux box for $200 is nothing new. I've been buying $180-250 Great Quality machines at Fry's for years. My daughter has one, I have several in the physics lab at the school where I teach, I gave one to my dad, etc. And although the "Great Quality" brand name probably sounds goofy to most people, I have in fact found that the quality of those machines is wonderful. I've never had a single hardware failure on any of them over many years.

In the physics lab, we have 7 Windows boxes supplied by the school, plus 3 Great Quality machines and one nicer linux box donated by a student. Because of that situation, I've had a lot of opportunities to see typical, naive users' first reactions to Linux running on low-end hardware. Basically GNOME and KDE are so similar to Windows that none of them have any issues with that. Many of them don't even realize they're not running Windows. Although GNOME feels dog-slow to me on these machines (especially the one that's five years old), I've never had a student complain about it, presumably because standards for responsiveness in a UI have been slipping over the years, and people are starting to perceive worse and worse performance as normal. (Personally, I'd go nuts trying to use these machines with GNOME, although Fluxbox is fine.) However, when it comes to using OpenOffice for graphing, we get a lot more problems. One problem is that, although in my eyes OOo Calc is actually too bug-for-bug similar to Excel, to many of my students the minor differences seem daunting. The other problem is that OOo is extremely slow to start up on a low-end machine. Although I perceive it as relatively snappy once it's started, it's hard to overcome that initial negative perception they get when it takes, say, a minute to start up.

You can see the keyboard flexing

[Anonymous Coward]

as it leans at an angle against the case in this photo:

http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/10/31/everex_gpc_tc2502.jpg

One good use

[routerl]

I recently got rid of cable because it is far too expensive and the programming is crap, so I was considering different alternatives for reviving my television. MythTV is the coolest one, but I don't have a second computer for the frontend which would replace my cable box. A $200 PC at those specs sounds about right. So there is at least one really good use for Walmart's cheap boxes.

Re:One good use

[Intron]

I don't see anything about expansion slots. If it's a micro-atx mobo, you probably can't add a tuner card.

Re:One good use

[vivtho]

IIRC MythTV supports some USB TV tuners. I might be mistaken though.

$200 PC for the blind?

[HyperJ]

PC's aren't generally that useful without a screen, maybe headline should have read 1/2 a pc for $200?

Re:Conflict of Ideals

[jamstar7]

A $200 Linux PC at Walmart, I can't tell whether to be happy that it actually being sold? or to be sad that it is being sold by the biggest corporation in the world. :(

Kinda like seeing your ex-wife drive off a cliff after a messy divorce...

...in your brand-new Porche.

Wal-Mart will sell them in droves....

[Anonymous Coward]

...and the customer service desk will not be able to
handle the returns.

Customers will take them home without looking too closely at the box,
turn them on and wonder, where's windows, where's Word, where's Internet Explorer?
What is this? It must be broken.

We're talking Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart customers here.

Get the details

[Dekortage]

First, FTA: "The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability." Funny or sad? You decide.

Second, some links about the system: buy it from WalMart, here's a big screenshot of it from the manufacturer's site, and although Everex doesn't list it among products, the model number and specification list makes me suspect it's kin to their GC2500 series, which doesn't appear to have any expansion slots (other than another RAM slot).

Re:Get the details

[Animats]

"The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability."

That's common in consumer electronics. DVD players are usually twice as wide as they should be. Audio components, too, tend to be mostly empty space inside. "Mini" versions have been marketed many times, but they're perceived as being "cheap".

hmm... sorry Google!

[WWMPCDD]

gOS... hmm. Yeah, I guess Google is beating itself over the head for not releasing a Google OS/copyrighting the name... It looks like some unknown company has beaten Google to it's own OS. There's no need for a Google OS anymore! This could be big.

Unless, of course, Google goes against the grain starts an operating system from scratch, and doesn't simply tag a Linux distro with the "Google" name and call it "gLinux".

Well, congrats to Everex. They had a good idea, beat out Google, and are selling it at Wal*Fart, for goodness sakes.

^^^This!

[Anonymous Coward]

WTH are they talking about?

What (apart from high-end applications like gaming, video editing etc) _needs_ more than 1.5Ghz and 512MB?

Oh wait.. Vista!

Yeah, that's the distros.

[Kadin2048]

As much as I like Linux, the modern distros are terribly sluggish on this particular machine. I think that's really because of the mentality of some of the distro packers rather than anything architectural about Linux itself. The big-name Linux distros are mostly playing the same eye candy war as Vista and Leopard; they're developed by people who have relatively new, high-powered machines, for people with the same equipment.

However, there are distros that offer less crap and have the same core, like Xubuntu, or even by just installing Debian and then pulling down your favorite desktop environment (I like Ratpoison, which is designed to work without a mouse). And unlike W2k, which really doesn't offer you much in the way of an upgrade path anymore, at least a Linux install lets you run a modern kernel, just without the fluff.

(As a datapoint, I'm running a modern Debian Stable kernel on a Pentium 133 with 48MB of RAM. I don't normally use any GUI on it at all, but it's fine for ncurses-based apps and for working as an SSH/VPN endpoint. It'd be tough to do that with most commercial OSes, because it's so old it wouldn't run current versions, and thus wouldn't be secure.)

Re:Only terrorists and hackers use Linux

[cp.tar]

You are, of course, quite right.

We have decided to focus on laptops instead.

Desktops are for Anonymous Cowards.

</troll>

Prediction

[Dr. Evil]

"g"OS, with Google plastered all over their website.

They're going to be sued out of existence in 15 minutes.

They are...

[phorm]

I have two servers running (LAN and webserver/mailserver). Both have Jetway motherboards: 2x1GB LAN, 1.5Ghz C7 CPU. Low power, low heat... but try not to cram them into too small an enclosure as they still get rather warmish if you box them in with a hard-drive (2.5" laptop drives are better for this).

My one warning is to be wary of some Jetway C7 (1.2Ghz/1.5Ghz) motherboards. My webserver has run without issue, but the LANserver has had odd lockups and I've read of others have this issue with high disk IO etc. I've just switched from an IDE to SATA and updated the BIOS, so it may be a null-issue now but still one to be wary of.

Thanks...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability." ...i'll only shop target from now on.

Why dselect is confusing --but we use aptitude now

[KWTm]

Next time you give debian a try, use aptitude instead of dselect. It navigates just like lynx, so it's pretty intuitive.

Yeah, I think Debian has made great strides since 2002. At the time, dselect was the only alternative to dpkg / apt-get.

When I used dselect to select a certain package, I could never tell whether other packages changed status that would be automatically installed or whether I would need to install them. My understanding was the former, but then when I tried to install, it would say, "Hey, you have to install such-and-such a package!" and I thought, "But isn't dselect supposed to do that automatically?"

And then it would come up with unresolved dependencies and I would have no idea what to do. At times it gave me a list and I couldn't tell whether I was suposed to choose one, or install all of them. Thinking back on it now, I realize now that the dependencies were screwed up and it wasn't the fault of my computer at all.

The Debian chatrooms and forums were full of elitists at the time (and, to an extent, still are). By this I don't mean that they were "RTFM" nasty to me, but that they were so familiar with Linux and Debian that they couldn't comprehend the viewpoint of a newbie. For example, there was one file, something like /etc/apt/sources.d (or something like that) that was supposed to contain the line "sources=100000". All the HowTo web pages said that this line had to be added to the file; same thing in the forums, and people told me this in chat. But, for the life of me, I couldn't find the file.

Finally, someone told me, "Well, if the file doesn't exist, you create it." Oh, I'm supposed to make the file myself! Was this supposed to be some minor point that should have been obvious to the newbie?

There were many other things, like the realization that the word "source" could refer to different things, sometimes in the same sentence: the source code of the programs, the location of the Deb packages on the Internet, or the actual "sources.list" file.

I am *very* glad that Ubuntu came along and looked at things from the perspective of the newbie. It made Debian usable. It made things like aptitude, Synaptic and Adept happen. (Yes, I know these aren't exclusive to Ubuntu, but without Ubuntu, I just don't think the Debian project itself would have had anywhere near the same focus on usability.)

I'm a Mac user, but I can lend a hand.

[Traegorn]

I mean, I've got the whole "smug" thing down pat... :P

Non-sequitur

[mcrbids]

Your post makes no sense at all. It goes something like this:

I bought a Wal-Mart PC. It had a dinky-small case, the CD ROM was broke, the hard drive was so small as to be worthless. The Operating System sucked so bad I gave up after just 10 minutes. I tried 4 times to find an Operating System that wasn't so bloody awful. (and dselect is just awful) After I replaced all the bad parts and wasted a bunch of time, I had a crappy, franken-PC that was seriously ugly and guaranteed to give small children nightmares.

OK, so far, so good. You've established a clear direction. But then you throw a curve ball:

Looks like Wal-Mart is back with more PC's for the people. That's great. It will bring more visibility to Ubuntu, and Linux in general. And that's the point of the whole thing: to let Linux have more visibility so that manufacturers, and people in general, won't say, "Hey, we don't have to make our video player compatible with Linux because nobody uses Linux."

How does one half of your post follow from the other?

Enlightenment???

[logicassasin]

Yeeeeeah... Ok... Tha machine is a touch on the wimpy side, but Enlightnement is, honestly, the only mistake being made here. Gnome or KDE should run reasonably well on this machine. I have a P3-700/512MB desktop at home with FC7 and Win XP installed and it runs well. I'm usually in KDE when I'm working in Linux and I find it quite responsive. Not as fast as XP, but by no means is it slow.

Enlightenment, however, is not the GUI to sell to people used to Windows. I LOVE the old Enlightenment wm (E16) (http://www.geocities.com/subject28/screenshot.txt is a pic of one of my old desktops) and I have high hopes for E17, but I don't think either is a good bet for a machine sold at WalMart.

My current laptop

[hummassa]

is a generic A380 with a Crusoe 700MHz (at least 4x slower than the topic machine) with 384MB RAM (a little bit more than half) and 20GB HD (4x less) and it runs Kubuntu _and_ OOo Just Fine (TM) [yes, OOo startup time is a litlle annoying the first time you run it, but that's it]

Re:My current laptop

[MightyMartian]

I was running a 500mhz AMD with 348mb of RAM and a 15gb IDE and 9gb SCSI, running Slackware 10, and, once I downloaded all the codecs, I was able to watch DivX video (the video card was some piece of crap 8mb, can't remember the manufacturer). I imagine 1.5ghz Via is going to be able to do at least that.

Well, this is interesting...

[rickb928]

I've been thinking of how I'm going to build my ammo box pc. I should just buy one of these and take the parts. I can always use the case for a doorstop.

A mini-ITX board is an easy fit, the PS I bet is tiny-ish, and I got a monitor. Heck, I bet it will take a stick or more of whatever RAM i got around, and 2GB makes it what I want.

Easier than calling Newegg.

Thanks, Wal-Mart. Making my life better. ITX parts on the shelf, sweeeeeeet...

Based on those specs ...

[LaughingCoder]

I can only assume it will be sold in the toy department.

Re:US Patriots use Free Software

[Macthorpe]

Software is a tool, nothing more. How you use it says more about you than it does about the company you bought it from.

No, the cat does not "got my tongue."

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Microsoft: If you do this, we'll stop selling our games through your hundred thousand Walmart stores.

Walmart: Bye

Microsoft: Let's not get hasty, boys.

Wow.

[seebs]

I just remember the time I tried to run enlightenment on what was, at the time, a high-end machine, and it was unusable, because enlightenment was so graphically intensive.

Times have changed, I guess.

Re:Why dselect is confusing --but we use aptitude

[martalli]

I agree that ubuntu is much easier to use than debian potato, or woody (released in 2002). However, they certainly predate any ubuntu release. I use ubuntu and kubuntu on almost all of my machines, but I would be cautious in attributing all the development in linux to ubuntu. They are simply pulling together other people's work....although that is what disto makers do, and maybe the word "simply" is inappropriate there. =)

Adept is sponsored by Canonical. Synaptic predates ubuntu and in fact was started by Conectiva. Aptitude apparently dates all the way back to 1999. (all info from wikipedia)

Perfect webserver. will it run OpenBSD?

[cdn-programmer]

Oh what a perfect webserver. I wonder it it supports ECC memory and if it will run OpenBSD.

Where do I get it? WOW.

Go for HP printers

[Cato]

I have an HP 6310 multi-function printer/scanner/copier - the printer works perfectly under Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty and Gutsy, and was very simple to set up. Just run the HPLIP Toolbox, which is pre-installed, and it discovers it, even over Ethernet, and does everything for you. An impressive contrast to Windows where the full download was quite enormous and took a long time to install...

I would generally go for HP as they have their own open-source projects for printer support, including HPLIP, and most printers should work well. Other vendors might work OK, but Canon iP5200 definitely doesn't without a commercial driver or (perhaps) a lot of setup.

Ubuntu has come a long way since 2005 when I struggled to get CUPS working with an HP Deskjet, and gave up.

Who will use it???

[sagax]

Your point is well taken. For those for whom this is a first PC, it is no problem. They have not already become accustomed to one particular interface or set of applications. The youngsters will take to it like a duck to water. Some of those are then but a few years from becoming code contributors. Those unwilling to learn the new, will just have to spend the money to purchase the software to which they have become accustomed.

Stop crushing my dreame.

[Medievalist]

Even better than that, the computers being sold as 'green PC' meaning thats the mfr's product name, and has nothing to do with being enviromentally conscious. Not only that, I heard that Alienware PC's are in fact, not made by aliens at all. Oh my god. Please don't tell me anything about the Keebler Elves, I don't think I could take it.

Similar to the Tesco one

[Alain Williams]

UK retailer tesco recently released a Linux PC with similar specs. Is this start of a new trend ?

Re:Only terrorists and hackers use Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

you can download it here.

http://www.thinkgos.com/files/gos-live-1.0_386.iso

looks like a live cd?

Shouldn't we talk about the REAL story here?????

[pappy97]

The real story is that five years after Wal-mart started selling linux PC's online...they are still selling them online, not in-store. That's the real story, and it still shows that linux isn't ready for general idiot consumer use, because well, wal-mart employees still don't know what linux is and hilarity would insue at most wal-marts when their employees try to explain that the computer doesn't have windows, but that the employee doesn't know if x game that specifically says it's for windows only will run on the $200 pc.

Slashdotted?

[MahariBalzitch]

Did walmart.com get slashdotted? I wanted to see the $200 Linux PC and this is what I got:

Walmart.com Scheduled Maintenance Walmart.com is temporarily unavailable while we make important upgrades to our site. We appreciate your patience and invite you to return soon.

If you need immediate assistance, please email us at help@walmart.com.

More responsive that Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

A person in a coma is more responsive than Vista =P

How things have changed...

[drew]

By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE)

Never thought I would live to see that statement on Slashdot back when I used Enlightenment...

MadTux is cheaper

[glthornberry]

A few weeks ago I came across MadTux.org while looking at the VectorLinux website. I was surprised how inexpensive their machines are ($149 - $289), all very well-equipped for the money. Most people would only complain about the size of the included HDD at 13.5GB, but it's plenty of room for your OS. You can get other drives for files (or not). Would also make a great thin-client in a fat box.

http://store.madtux.org/product_info.php?cPath=57&products_id=311

For example, for $149 you can get:
* AMD Sempron M 3000+ Processor
* 512MB DDR2 RAM included
* 13.5GB Hard Disk
* 100Mbps fast-ethernet port
* 128-bit 3D/2D Graphics engine
* Full-featured AGP v2.0 compliant 8x transfer mode AGP controller
* 3 PCI slots
* UltraDMA EIDE controller
* Memory expandable to 2GB
* Two 32-bit PCI slots
* Two IDE connectors onboard
* Realtek ALC655 6-channel AC'97 Audio CODEC
* Two PS/2 ports for mouse and connector, one serial, one parallel ports, one VGA port, one LAN port, four USB 2.0 ports and audio jacks

a good media center configuration

[Fedarkyn]

I don't think a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive a bad configuration. Here in Brazil it is a standard low end configuration. I only would put in a smaller box and sell it as a media center. it would surelly substitute my dvd here. a torrent and emule client directly connected to my TV. :P

Nuh-uh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, vanilla XFCE isn't very different from the Enlightenment setup they show.

Canonical modifies their XFCE settings to _make_ it like Gnome/Windows.

Multi-Processor VIA C7?

[tji]

C7 is pretty low end, so this is probably unlikely.

But, it seems like this would make a good CPU for an SMP Linux server system. It's not powerful enough on its own to be a high-end server engine. A single slow core would be more subject to getting swamped while trying to keep up with big tasks. But, throw a second core in there, and it would be a new ballgame.

With the VERY low power usage of these chips, even two of them would be well below the other available options.

For my specific purpose, I'm thinking of this for a Linux server. It's doing many tasks, most of which require very low CPU overhead. But, it also functions as a MythTV backend.. some common tasks related in MythTV can easily take all the CPU power. For example, commercial detection, of HD video transcoding. But, dedicate one CPU to that stuff, and the other could easily keep up with everything else.

Enlightenment!

[Kludge]

I remember trying Enlightenment back in 1998. My .enlightenment files still have that date on them. I ended up not using it because it was too slow and bloated for my 133MHz computer.
Gosh...

Re:Why dselect is confusing --but we use aptitude

[cycoj]

Why did you not want to use apt-get? I think it's the way better alternative to dselect.

Re:US Patriots use Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope to hell you are some kind of bot gone awry, because I have trouble believing that anyone would be so poignantly stupid as this.

wow, this is perfect imho.

[Anonymous Coward]

perfect, mini-itx stuff here is hard to come by, especially under $200.

Most mini boards are $200 by themselves. this includes a HDD, RAM, optical drive, case, speakers, keyboard and mouse. all for $200, which is a steal.

I may have to go to walmart for the first time in many years now.

I want to get a pc for my mother, this would be it.

I'd replace the HDD with a laptop HD or a 4gb or 8 gb SSD for maximum energy savings and durability, not to mention I'd buy a smaller case for it and use the case it comes with for something else. though just to be safe, for the first 3 months or so, I'd run it as-is just so if the thing is a dud, I can return it.

Great for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, we certainly know that your needs are the most important, and since they are being met--case closed! However, other people have other needs, so if MS Office meets that, and OO.org doesn't, what's it to you? --AC

Well, I took a bite!

[Slashdot Junky]

Dear world,

Well, I took a bite and ordered one to replace my existing four year old P3/650 MP3 jukebox running Debian. With it using a mini-ITX board, I hope I'll have to option of moving all but the optical drive to a smaller case. Even if not possible, this just seems like an awesome deal for building a home/media server. I just wish better specs and even internal photos were available. Everex's website presently refers back to Walmart.com.

Later,
-Slashdot Junky

Re:Well, I took a bite!

[Slashdot Junky]

One more thing... I can just return it if reasons for not buying it surface between now and when I finally see it. I'm excited about this find. Thanks for submitting and posting this one people!

why enlightenment?

[smash]

Sure, it's probably less resource intensive than KDE or Gnome, but given that most of the actual usable apps out there are Gnome/GTK or KDE based anyway... you may as well run the desktop environment to go with it.

512MB of ram is enough to run KDE or Gnome pretty comfortably. I know this, because i've been doing it for the past 12 months - even fedora 6 + compiz and the funky 3d cube desktop ran fine. On a 2002 vintage (Dell C640 to be precise) laptop. Sure it won't be uber-fast when dealing with large data files, but that's not the point of a $200 machine.

Not to take anything away from enlightenment, but all this is doing is giving users a "non-standard" (yes, yes, there is no "standard" linux desktop, but at least one of the major desktop environments would be a start) configuration to deal with.

I reckon the machine would be far more useful if they stuck another 512mb (for the $30-$50 or whatever that pitiful amount of ram costs these days) in it and shipped with KDE or Gnome.

Re:Only terrorists and hackers use Linux

[Tetsujin]

The year of Linux on the desktop is never. Well, you know, you're probably right, if you mean that Linux will never be one of the primary general-use home/office workstation OSes... I honestly think the Linux community has their priorities wrong if they're trying to make it an OS for everyone. Other people have already made the OSes for everyone. So how about an OS for me? I am a hacker... Linux could use some improvement, but it still fits my needs pretty well.

It would work fine for playing movies

[walterbyrd]

I have a 1.6gz/512mb 5 year old box. I dual boot debian and w2k. I play movies on it all the time, no problem at all.

My machine if very responsive, on both sides. I would buy a new PC, if I had any reason to do so. But, since I'm not a gamer, everything works just fine as it is.

Maybe KOffice or Abiword?

[walterbyrd]

The new Koffice is supposed to be pretty good. Should be out within a year. From what I've been reading, it is much faster than OpenOffice. Google stuff should be getting better also.

I suppose if you can get by with abiword and gnumeric, you'll be alright.

The "gamers" who buy this only play flash games

[Joce640k]

The "gamers" who buy this probably only play online flash games anyway so who cares?

Re:US Patriots use Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's quite serious. Scary, yah?

Just be aware of what you're buying

[Propaganda13]

Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 - retail version
"The software is not licensed for use in any commercial, non-profit, or
revenue-generating business activities."

So only use it for homework or family use. DO NOT use it for charities, churches, working at home, etc.
The good part is that you can legally install it on 3 computers at home.

Re:Just be aware of what you're buying

[kbielefe]

Did I miss the tag? People actually still pay money to live under those kinds of restrictions? What features does a home user need that they can't get with free software?

Re:Shouldn't we talk about the REAL story here????

[Anonymous Coward]

The real story is that five years after Wal-mart started selling linux PC's online...they are still selling them online, not in-store.

Nice try.

According to the blog item, it will be available in these stores:
Anchorage (S), Ketchikan, Anniston, Attalla (Sw), Boaz, Centre, Clanton, Daphne/Lake Forest, Decatur, Greenville, Guntersville, Huntsville, Huntsville, Jacksonville, Leeds, Madison, Mobile (West), Moulton, Northport, Ozark, Pell City, Russellville, Saraland, Scottsboro, Springville, Talladega, Thomasville, Ashdown, Clarksville, Harrison, Little Rock (S), Little Rock (Sw), Malvern, North Little Rock, Pine Bluff, Page, Phoenix, Phoenix, Phoenix, Phoenix (East), Phoenix (Maryvale), Phoenix (North), Prescott (W), Sahuarita, Scottsdale, Tempe, Antelope, Antioch, Apple Valley, Bakersfield, Barstow, Brea, Ceres, Chico, Chula Vista (W), City Of Industry, Corona, Corona (S), Dinuba, Fairfield, Folsom, Fontana, Fremont (W), Glendora, Highland, Huntington Beach, La Habra, Lake Elsinore, Livermore, Lodi, Manteca, Martinez, Milpitas, Mountain View, Napa, Norwalk, Oceanside, Orange, Panorama City, Perris, Placerville, Pleasanton, Poway, Rancho Cordova, Riverside, Riverside (E), Rohnert Park, Sacramento, Sacramento (Nw), San Bernardino (N), San Diego, San Diego (E), San Marcos, Santa Ana, Santa Maria, Simi Valley, Sonora, Stevenson Ranch, Temecula, Tulare, Victorville, Visalia, West Hills, Woodland, Brighton, Canon City, Delta, Fountain, Glenwood Springs, Lajunta, Littleton, Pueblo, Rifle, Salida, Avon, Branford, Hamden, Lisbon, Newington, North Windham, Rocky Hill, Shelton, Stratford, Waterbury, New Castle, Wilmington, Auburndale, Boca Raton, Brooksville (E), Chipley, Cooper City, Crawfordville, De Land, Destin, Jacksonville, Jacksonville (Clinton), Jacksonville Beach, Jupiter, Kendall, Kissimmee, Lake Worth, Lakeland, Lehigh Acres, Margate, Miami (Airport), Naples, Naples (N), Okeechobee, Ormond Beach, Pensacola, Perry, Quincy, Sebastian, St Petersburg, Starke, Tampa (West), Venice, Vero Beach, Yulee, Zephyrhills, Atlanta (Castlegate), Atlanta (Gresham), Bainbridge, Bremen, Cedartown, Commerce, Duluth (Nw), Eastman, Fitzgerald, Fort Oglethorpe, Hartwell, La Fayette, Lawrenceville (S), Lithonia, Macon(Ne), Madison, Milledgeville, Savannah, Stone Mountain, Swainsboro, Thomson, Trion, Tucker, Vidalia, Honolulu (C), Kahului, Kailua Kona, Mililani, Pearl City, Waipahu, Cedar Rapids, Creston, Oskaloosa, Spirit Lake, Storm Lake, Blackfoot, Boise, Mountain Home, Ponderay, Addison, Bedford Park, Benton, Bridgeview, Carbondale, Charleston, Chicago (W), Counry Club Hills, Darien, Decatur (S), Elgin, Glen Ellyn, Matteson, Morton, Niles, Princeton, Rolling Meadows, Vandalia, Villa Park, Wheeling, Aurora, Boonville, Brownsburg, Goshen, Hammond, Indianapolis (N), Jasper, Lawrence, Logansport, Merrillville, Monticello, Portland, Scottsburg, Tell City, Arkansas City, Bonner Springs, Emporia, Leavenworth, Liberal, Newton, Overland Park, Parsons, Roeland Park, Topeka, Bowling Green, Bowling Green (Nw), Lawrenceburg, Lexington (Se), Louisville, Morehead, Nicholasville, Oak Grove, Paducah, Russellville, Amite, Boutte, Galliano, Harvey, Jena, La Place, New Orleans, Walker, West Monroe, Bellingham, Brockton, Danvers, Framingham, Lunenburg, Methuen, North Dartmouth, North Reading, Springfield, Swansea, Ware, Westfield, Weymouth, Abingdon, Baltimore/P. Covington, Bowie, Columbia, Fruitland, Germantown, Glen Burnie (North), Hanover, Laurel, Nottingham, Oakland, Towson, Waldorf, Brewer, Brunswick, Oxford, Palmyra, Presque Isle, Scarborough, Windham, Cheboygan, Comstock Park, Escanaba, Hastings, Sandusky, Sterling Heights, Tawas City, Traverse City, Troy, Warren, Brooklyn Park, Coon Rapids, Detroit Lakes, Maple Grove, Pine City, Thief River Falls, Branson West, Camdenton, Carthage, Cassville, Chesterfield, Chillicothe, De Soto, Desloge, Dexter, Eureka, Excelsior Springs, Fenton, Independence, Kennett, Kirksville, Kirkwood, Malden, Maplewood, Marshfield, Maryville, Moberly, Neosh

So Your Electricity Is Free?

[meehawl]

Celeron D 356

TDP on this is 65/85 Watts. TDP for the 1.5 GHz C7 is 12 Watts. Including the other power-eating components of the Newegg box (remember, the Walmart PC is Mini-ITX inside), if you buy these boxes and leave them on for a few hours a day for two years, you're talking about a huge difference in energy costs.

there's different *kinds* of linux?

[significants]

"But then what do you want for $200?"

A problem too is that consumers who are unfamiliar with *nix will not jump in and think, "Oh, well, this distribution and hardware is alright and decent for $200, I wonder what a more feature-filled distribution with better hardware would be like?" Rather, they'll think, "this Linux thing is adequate for $200, but it's in no way a competitor to Windows."

Maybe a comparison could be made between Linux distributions, and different versions of Windows... except then my parents would ask, "well, what's the latest one?" The confusion to my parents arises with such different distributions all being under the "Linux" umbrella.

Re:there's different *kinds* of linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

If think if people get used to linux they will like it, and enjoy the idea that windows isn't spying on them with DRM etc. Hopefully when they upgrade it will be to a faster computer and a newer version of Linux rather than a Vista machine.

Re:Shouldn't we talk about the REAL story here????

[pappy97]

Ok, I can't wait to see how many angry noob customers complain because the computer didn't "just work."

I think XP will run just fine, because...

[Slashdot Junky]

Dear world,

I think XP will run just fine on this PC, because I am running XP Pro, Office2K, Photoshop, and other apps just fine on a P2/400 with 384MB of RAM. I'm actually going to load XP on the one I ordered first as a test and possibly order another if it runs fine. The one I did order will eventually replace my existing MP3 jukebox PC.

I'm never been one to play games or doing any 3D work. So, I'm confident that this PC will work fine with XP. The article states that Vista doesn't run well. We all know that Vista would tax even a super computer.

Later,
-Slashdot Junky

no modem support?

[CyberdogOSX]

are you kidding me? it doesn't even support it's own modem? now, i know there are modem that Linux supports. say, how about including one of those? DOH! that is really really really stupid

sure it's not win but

[A_Lupin]

There's a start button module in E17 (if it's that version?), and the border flipping can be disabled. If you always compare any gui to W, sure that none will "be" as "good". Xfce, still is a good alternative, but it is a bit heavier than the 3 to 5 megas needed to run E with a bunch of modules without a gap.

Prime example of veteran not understanding newbie

[KWTm]

Why did you not want to use apt-get? I think it's the way better alternative to dselect.

I will answer you because I think you really genuinely don't know, although I'd classify this as one of those things that are obvious to a newbie but somehow gets missed by veterans.

Using "apt-get" requires that you know what you want to install. There is no "apt-get install one of the board games I already know but doesn't take too long to play". If you know that the chess game you want to install is called "xboard" and needs the chess engine "crafty", yes, you can do "apt-get install xboard crafty". But, as a newbie, I wanted to see a list of games (or whatever type of program I needed), read through the descriptions, etc. Even if I knew (for example) that I could install xboard and crafty, I wanted to see what alternatives there were. You know, kinda like the way you browse through the menu at a restaurant rather than just ordering as you are seated, "I want a 8-ounce steak medium with potatoes."

(And, no, it wasn't the same browsing through FTP listings of the Debian archive; their web site wasn't as good then as it is now.)

So, in a nutshell, apt-get and dselect serve entirely different purposes.

This is apart from the obvious "newbies don't like the command line" platitude that every veteran should have taped to their computer monitor before asking a newbie, "Why don't you just ..."

Re:the frosty piss touches me at night

[awrowe]

Call me an idiot for clicking on it, but Iceweasel told me as it danced across the screen that it prevented 1312 popups from appearing after I hit that link. Nice try, whoever wrote that script, but no cigar this time. Entertaining though.

Re:Prime example of veteran not understanding newb

[cycoj]

Thanks for your answer, I really asked because I was curious. For me both dselect and apt-get are commandline utilities, that's why I didn't even think about that point of yours. As to the list of games, I kinda know what you mean, however I think that after just a little bit of getting used to apt-cache/apt-get etc. are a lot easier and more comfortable than even aptitude, even more so than dselect. I know that a lot of newbies are afraid of the commandline (I have converted my ex-girlfriend and my mother to linux so I really know). I just can't understand why. For a lot of tasks it is a lot more natural than a gui, as it's essentially language. Sure you got to remember some commands but for quite a few things that is just better than clicking through tons of menus etc. (let's not even speak about finding the option you want). I don't advertise the cli for everything, but for a lot of things it is actually faster and more natural, for example filemanagement.

Newbies fear cmd line not because of text mode

[KWTm]

Wow, this is a really interesting conversation, even if it's starting to wander off-topic. Congratulations; it's not often that someone can induce me to answer three times to the same thread. By this time, this article is old enough that most readers have probably moved on to the fresher articles, but I'll answer because I think the answer is worth sharing --and if anyone else has any insight, I'd love to hear it.

Why did you not want to use apt-get?

"newbies don't like the command line"

For me both dselect and apt-get are commandline utilities, that's why I didn't even think about that point of yours...
I know that a lot of newbies are afraid of the commandline. ... I just can't understand why... for a lot of things it is actually faster and more natural

The answer is actually very simple.

Imagine for a moment that you have just been seated at a restaurant serving ethnic food that is new to you --say, for example, that your new girlfriend (who's dying to learn Linux from you) wants to try out that new Thai restaurant with you (replace "Thai" with any type of cuisine with which you are not familiar).

The waiter comes up to you and, instead of handing you a menu, says, "So, what do you want?"
"Well, what do you have?" you ask.
He shrugs. "Anything," he says.
"What do you mean, 'anything'?"
"It means exactly what I said," he answers. "You can order anything you want. We cook hundreds of different dishes, any way you like."
"Okay, I'll have a steak."
"That's not a Thai dish."
"But you said *anything*."
"But this is a Thai restaurant. When I said 'anything', I meant anything *Thai*, of course."
"Okay, I'll have a typical Thai entree dish."
"No such thing as 'Thai entree dish'. You have to tell me which Thai entree dish."
"Well I have no idea."
"Well, order anything. Anything *Thai*," he adds pointedly.
"Such as?"
The waiter becomes exasperated. "Well, you can have Pad See Ew, or Tom Yum Gong, or--"
At this point, your girlfriend wisely cuts in and says, "Could we have a menu?"
The waiter rolls his eyes. "All these newbies wanting to order from a menu! I don't know why you don't just specify what you want. It's a lot faster and a lot more natural to just order directly!"

The point, I'm sure you'll have seen, is that when the command line asks the newbie, "Okay, what do you want to do now?" the newbie has absolutely no idea. There are too many possibilities. Sometimes the newbie will gamely try a command like "check my email" or "email", but the stony response of "bash: email: command not found" quickly puts him in his place. Hell, even *I* forget the ins and outs of some commands with their options (is it "find " or "find "?).

A common mistake, of which I will make yours an example (but you're certainly not alone in this), is that you think the newbie fears text mode. That's why you felt that both apt-get and dselect were command line tools. Now you see the difference? With apt-get, you could type any sequence of characters for a package name and there would be nothing to stop you except some cryptic message, "No such package as 'Thai entree dish'." The "dselect" command limits your options so that it guides you to what you want. You can select packages. It doesn't matter whether the interface is graphical, ncurses, or just "Press 1, 2 or 3". Of course, newbies are more likely to warm up to the GUI, but that's secondary.

I would love to have a tool that showed a menu of choices, either in a GUI or a ncurses text interface, that let me choose common commands, like that confusing "find" command I mentioned earlier. On the "find" window would be a form with a space to fill in "Enter directories to search" and "What filename are you looking for?" with perhaps some radio buttons or checkboxes for various command-line parameters. When you click OK, not only does it execute the comm

I can out-troll you fucktard

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter, if you are tired of seeing Microsoft and Windows even existing, here's what you can do about it.

You can pick one or two.

1.
-Go Find a cliff or a bridge somewhere
-Take your entire fucktarded family
-Have all of them jump off to their deaths
-Jump to you death

2.
-Find a razor
-Run a hot bath
-Slit your fucking wrists

When you do either you will no longer see Windows/Microsoft and we won't have to put up with fucktards like you again.

One man's trash...

[shentino]

"It has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software. By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers

Wow, talk about relativity. That "unacceptably low-end" for most people would be a gem for me!

Mine's an AMD Athlon (== PII), 256MB RAM, 20GB hard drive, and I think it's great...

POS? Yeah, sure, but not for me!

Re:Sounds like a servicable Web/mail server to me.

[raddan]

I ran my personal web/email server (OpenBSD/Apache/Postfix/Courier IMAP) on a VIA C3 system for several years. Nice machine, relatively low power (added ~$7-10 to my electricity bill per month). Unfortunately, it died without warning one day. Motherboard is completely nonresponsive-- even with another power supply. Although it was connected to a UPS, I suppose I can't rule out power issues as being the cause. I've since replaced it with a throwaway PIII machine from the office, and that machine seems to fill the same role just as well-- including being a hell of a lot faster.

I'd give VIA another shot, only I can pretty much get an endless supply of old PIIIs from work.

advertising

[m2943]

Hey, but that's just me (and thousand of co-workers here), but please, feel free to use what you want. Only don't preach, please..

Why not? Does your weak ego feel threatened?

Microsoft is "preaching" to the tune of billions of dollars a year, complete with fake testimonials, astro-turfing, psychological manipulation, and FUD campaigns.

A little heart-felt preaching by real grass-roots movements shouldn't hurt.

Office for students cost 99 USD, and if your college /university has the Campus agreement, it costs USD 45. For me, as an uiversiy worker with the Select agreement, it cost USD 25. So I rathere pay (hell, even USD200 if needed) but I rather use MS office with all integration between it's parts than OO even if it's free.

Well, aren't you lucky. But once you enter the real world, it stops being so cheap.

Wonder if it'll make it to Oz

[willllllllllll]

Wonder if it'll make it to Oz. I know plenty of people who'd love a cheap computer for their kids.

The $300 version claims Vista as 'more secure'

[willllllllllll]

The $300 version claims Vista as 'more efficient, more secure and more fun'. Time to polish up those false advertising claims.

" # Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic Edition Makes your computing experience more efficient, more secure and more fun "

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=7754613

Also, what's so 'Additional' about the RAM in

" Additional Specifications Hard Drive Size: 80 GB System RAM: 1024 MB Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic "

15 MFlops?

[leereyno]

Don't you mean 15 gigaflops?

The original Cray I from 1976 did 200 MFlops (on paper).

Microsoft license pricing

[Savage-Rabbit]

As I'm sure you're already aware, OEM pricing is very different from full retail, plus it's not like he's going to need Office Professional (the one that would cost $460) just to get Powerpoint. Looking at MS's product matrix, he could get away with "Home & Student" and still get Powerpoint - that can be had from Newegg for $129, and includes Word, Office, Powerpoint, and OneNote. Compare to StarOffice, which is $70 - yes, you get most of the same functionality, but it's still not quite the same; the point, however, is that this is less than a third of the price you quoted.

Windows licensing, meanwhile, is not $210 for OEM licensing. A NewEgg search reveals that you can get OEM licensing in packs of three for roughly $410; that works out to under $140 per license. Obviously, mass-manufacturers of PCs get much more favorable licensing pricing than that, but, for the sake of argument, we'll say that the customer is paying $140. This is still $70 less than the number you pulled out.

So, at this point, we've spent no more than $270 in software. Is this $270 you don't have to spend if you get the WalMart Linux PC? Of course, but if the WalMart Linux PC doesn't fit your needs, $270 is a reasonable number, and certainly much more reasonable than the hyperbole-screaming $2500 you came up with on a whim. While I agree with what you said about the original price estimate being exaggerated I'm pretty sure most average user will simply download Windows, MS Office and other software off Bittorrent rather thay buy it (or more likely get somebody to do it for them since most average home user are not savvy enough to do so them selves). Keep in mind that this type of user is quite happy if he/she has a browser, e-mail client, Office Suite that can open basic MS Office documents and a few simple games (and when I say simple games I don't mean Warcraft I mean Tetris, Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc...). I have seen enough average home users (and long time Windows users) adapt to Mac OS X with little enough difficulty so why not a WalMart Linux PC? One of the biggest reasons why one of these WalMart Linux PCs might be switched to Windows would be the iPod/iTunes issue, failure to get a Digital Camera working with Linux or some similar small (but annoying) gadget related problem. While I'm sure many of these WalMart PCs will get a RAM 'upgrade' followed by a quick Windows XP, MS Office 'upgrade' some of them might actually end up running Linux for good. I'd actually be interested in finding out what the retention rate is for the original OS and software on these things.

I stand corrected.

[hummassa]

It's GigaFlops.

Let me tell you the way

[Aceticon]

The way of the future is the 1 pixel screen - with a really, really big pixel.

Also the single key keyboard, having one single huge key with, in big bold red shinny letters, the text "Do Stuff!!!".

After all bigger is better and we need to make computers simpler so that anybody of any age (we're talking newborns here) can use it without any special training.

Of course, all of this will run the latest Windows version and require 4, octal-core CPUs running at 5 GHz with at least one TB memory and special space folding technology that allows each computer to have it's own private universe for solid state data storage.

Pretty sure the TFS is -5 Flamebait

[conspirator57]

Just look at the geek rants it's inspired. Who cares if it's a bit under power. It's a PC for $200, running Linux, carried by the largest retailer in the country. I'd say this is good.

Re:Only terrorists and hackers use Linux

[budgenator]

A Windows workstation is an oxymoron, a workstation by definition is unix or Linux based as in a Sun workstation. I have trouble even considering a x86 cpued computer a workstation even an operon is a stretch to me. Windows runs on commodity computers, workstations are not commodity computers.