$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

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: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.