A Review of the $200 Wal-Mart Linux PC

bcrowell writes "Wal-Mart's new $200 Linux PC has generated a lot of buzz in geek circles. Although they're sold out of stores, I bought one for my daughter via mail order, and have written up a review of the system. The hardware seems fine for anyone but a hardcore gamer, but the pre-installed gOS flavor of Ubuntu has a lot of rough edges."

Comments

But the real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...does it run wind... Never mind

it will lie to you about cake

[User 956]

the pre-installed gOS flavor of Ubuntu has a lot of rough edges.

If you think gOS is bad, you should see gladOS.

Re:it will lie to you about cake

[HalifaxRage]

Still sounds like a POS to me.

Re:it will lie to you about cake

[Anonymous Coward]

The Aperture Science Enrichment Centre is unhappy to hear you say that. please assume the party escort submission position, a party associate will be along shortly to bring you to your... party

Re:it will lie to you about cake

[Anonymous Coward]

i wonder what that thing is? it must not be very important.

maybe it's a raw sewage container. you should rub your face all over it.

"there's no sense crying over every mistake, just keep on trying till you run out of cake."

Re:it will lie to you about cake

[Spikeles]

Will there be cake?

Re:it will lie to you about cake

[Anonymous Coward]

the cake is a lie

Hardcore gamer?

[Poromenos1]

It would appear that there are two kinds of PC users, hardcore gamers and normal people. Not so, there are also people who enjoy an occasional game of HL2 or people who work with huge amounts of data or who run extensive calculations on their PCs (or hell, even Photoshop). Lumping PCs into two categories, "Bleeding edge, $2000 PC" and "Everything else" isn't that informative. Maybe he should have said "very good for the average user (web browsing, flash games, office suites)", which I don't doubt it is (average users require fewer resources than even today's cheapest PCs have).

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[wfberg]

average users require fewer resources than even today's cheapest PCs have

If I had a dime for everytime someone complained about their lowend PC being "too slow!" and then finding out it only has 512MB of RAM, I'd.. well, I would've earned a couple of bucks anyway..

Selling a PC with less than a gig (or 2, if it comes with Vista preinstalled) is downright criminal.

Sure, average moes won't stress the CPU or play high end video games, but visiting a few Jpop-video rich myspace pages, while skype'ing and IM'ing at the same time does kinda require RAM.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[ozmanjusri]

"Selling a PC with Vista preinstalled is downright criminal."

Fixed that for you.

The Everex PC is designed from scratch as a low-end machine and the OS is lightweight to match its specs. You don't put tractor tyres on a Hyundai Excel, and you don't put Vista on this machine.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[malsdavis]

He's referring to the home consumer market, you are talking about the business/professional market. For the home market, there are really only 2 categories: normal and gamer. Those running "extensive calculations" on their PC, are almost always using the computer professionally (although the use of home computers for digital video watching & conversion is maybe changing this a little).

Photoshop is a bad example, home users might dabble with a photo or two in Photoshop SE or Paint Shop Pro which will happily perform such tasks on an average cheap home PC. This is completely different to the sort of professional graphic design activities for which a high-spec business PC is required.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[meringuoid]

If I had a dime for everytime someone complained about their lowend PC being "too slow!" and then finding out it only has 512MB of RAM, I'd.. well, I would've earned a couple of bucks anyway.

My PC only has 512MB of RAM; built it in about February 2003. Runs Gutsy for most things, has a Windows disk in there for games too. The only RAM issue I've ever really had is that when a Civ 4 game on a big world gets into the modern era, everything slows down horribly - so very many cities and units around the place. I haven't tried to run Portal on this thing yet, though :-)

I might build a new one this year, but... really, this PC's just a net terminal most of the time, or a movie player. Neither task strains it at all. Yes, I'd like to play newer games, but I already have stacks of games I haven't finished that I've accumulated over the years, and if I do decide that I absolutely have to play Bioshock, a 360 is a hell of a lot cheaper than building the gaming box o' doom.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Poromenos1]

I agree that this was a bad example. HD movie playback, perhaps? Processors under 2 GHz can't handle it, from what I've seen, and it's something anyone would do. A 7.2 MPel picture (such as one from a digital camera), even in PSP, would take up 115ish MB of RAM (assuming 16 bits per pixel). All I'm saying is that there aren't only two categories of hardware, "average user" and "hardcore gamer".

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Poromenos1]

As I feared, that calculation was (obviously) incorrect. Calculators will be the death of us all, I tell you.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Constantine XVI]

Selling PCs with 512MB of RAM is perfectly acceptable in my book, as long as it isin't running Vista. Just about every PC I use on a daily basis has 512MB (except one, my gaming rig, naturally), and they never really feel slow.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[PopeRatzo]

But most pc users will need more than 512k to run all their spyware, trojans and worms.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[TehZorroness]

512MB a crime? I would have to disagree. I've been gaming on a computer with 512MB of ram and an 8 year old athlon-xp. I've played HL2, CS:S, as many Q3A mods as I can count, and a few others. With Windows, the computer starts to crawl after about a month. I don't blame the hardware though. I blame the operating system. I have had ArchLinux running flawlessly on the same box for about 6 months now and I was using Gentoo for about a year before that.

Windows became a pain, having to be reinstalled on a monthly basis (I even had to call Microsoft once and have them reactivate my product key). I'm glad I dumped it (along with as much proprietary software as I could - with the exception of those wretched video drivers).

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

The athlon xp came out near the end of 2001. How can yours be 8 years old?

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. PCs that I used to spend most of my time on were:

#1: celeron 2.4g, 256m ram, geforce 4, debian sid. usually running kde.
#2: athlon k7, 1g, 128m ram, geforce 2, debian lenny. e16 does its job well here.
#3: celeron 300m, 192m ram, some random s3 video, debian etch. usually a remote x session, but from time to time fluxbox is used.

Hardly a high-end hardware.

I do all sorts of things: drawing stuff in gimp, programming (python, lisp, some perl), digital effects for my guitar, surfing the web and chatting with people (I really do!), occasionally some weird experiments with remote X and sharing processing power. I even play games: #1 and #2 can handle all the good quake3 like games, and #1 had no problems with jedi outcast, call of duty, and a few others. Hell, I remember playing gta2 on #3 back in the win95 days. Not the newest titles around here, but hey. They all rocked. And they still do.

When I need to do processor-intensive tasks on machine #3 I just ssh to something bigger and I'm fine.

Not upgrading anything anytime soon (maybe just moving some memory from #3 to #2).

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Darundal]

Maybe he should have said "very good for the average user (web browsing, flash games, office suites)"

No, because he if you read the article, he got the computer because It was time to buy my daughter a cheap Linux system to be used for schoolwork and playing flash games . However, he never actually complained about the hardware being underpowered (which seems to be an assumption of your comment).

Hardware wise, he complained about a low efficiency power supply (which, considering the machine is branded as green, in an environmentally friendly sense) leading to wasted power, and mentioned the fact that there was what he assumed to be a non-functioning winmodem. Insofar as software, he felt that the OS had a strong Google branding (enough to be compared to, but not called, crapware) and that the OS was rough around the edges and as such shouldn't have been included with a system like this (aimed at Grandma).

He never said anything that supports your assumption that he is Lumping PCs into two categories, "Bleeding edge, $2000 PC" and "Everything else". Can you please explain to me where that assumption is coming from?

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[LM741N]

I am neither type of user. I need a fast machine at home for FreeBSD and OpenBSD for doing "make world" and other compilations.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an excellent system for many needs. I bought one to use as a Linux Desktop for a client. Replaced gOS with an alternate dist/config, of course. Even many business users do not need the hardware requirements imposed by Vista for doing their jobs, if they simply had an O/S and apps that aren't so bloated. Remember, this was a machine that pretty much a year ago was considered NORMAL for a Windows O/S.

With all the speed and memory boosts we've added to the hardware, Microsoft has NOT maded us coorespondingly more productive. So why pay so much more to get a machine that you can't edit a document, display a spreadsheet, or surf the internet any faster than you could before. Many of the "improvements" like high-end graphics eye candy, DX10 (a gamer item), DRM, and other bloat do not make me more productive as a home or a corporate user.

This machine can serve a wide variety of needs in a corporate environment, at great cost savings over the requirements of a faster, memory-loaded, larger disked, higher-end graphic card, and Vista-licensed counterpart. I welcome our Everex overlords, especially since Fry's no longer sells the GQ31xx systems I've previously deployed.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[JohnBailey]

average users require fewer resources than even today's cheapest PCs have

If I had a dime for everytime someone complained about their lowend PC being "too slow!" and then finding out it only has 512MB of RAM, I'd.. well, I would've earned a couple of bucks anyway.. And how many of those were Linux users? I ran Fedora Core 5 and 6 on a cobbled together PC with 512 meg memory, a cheap 128 meg Nvidia card and an Athlon 2600 processor while I was making the move to Linux, and it was quite nippy enough. It was more pleasent to use thatn my then 300Mhz Athlon64 running XP Pro.

Selling a PC with less than a gig (or 2, if it comes with Vista preinstalled) is downright criminal. Agreed for Windows, not for Linux.

Sure, average moes won't stress the CPU or play high end video games, but visiting a few Jpop-video rich myspace pages, while skype'ing and IM'ing at the same time does kinda require RAM. True enough, although I have found that not so many low end users are really into having several programs running at once.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Everex PC is designed from scratch as a low-end machine and the OS is lightweight to match its specs. You don't put tractor tyres on a Hyundai Excel, and you don't put Vista on this machine."

Isn't that the car that doesn't know how to multiply?

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[DeusExCalamus]

But not more than 640KB. That's all anyone should need!

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, average moes won't stress the CPU or play high end video games, but visiting a few Jpop-video rich myspace pages, while skype'ing and IM'ing at the same time does kinda require RAM.

Not to mention a very short attention span..

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[PReDiToR]

I respectfully disagree.

I used to be a member of a chat community that had forums hosted on DelphiForums and the single largest demographic that used them was 30-50 year old mothers/housewives.
This group used to ask me for advice on creating "sigs" and which program to use.

They all thought that Paint Shop Pro, because it had a slightly shallower learning curve was the one for them, but I told them that the extra initial effort required to learn PhotoShop was worth it, to save learning the whole package from scratch when they outgrew PSP.

This happened regularly. For people that read all the tutorials and want to use alpha transparencies, channels, layers and all the whistles and bells, then animate them, you really do need to use PS.

I suspect that things haven't changed that much, and there are still hundreds of thousands of middle-white American women sitting around all day at home making pretty pictures that sparkle and twinkle and look all "ooh! Shiney" to take up bandwidth on their posts to a forum about a virtual world.

This to me is the definition of a home user, ymmv.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered that 40 or 80 bucks for a couple gigs of memory MIGHT, maybe be worth the investment? Really. $40 a gig for DDR this weekend.

RAM is cheap. It goes in a PC you probably use every day for lots of things which might benefit from the extra memory.

But don't let me stop you from spending nearly 10 times that money on a console for one game that you'll probably finish once and forget about.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Sandbags]

I (unfortunately) worked in retail PC sales for about 3 years, so I'm very familiar with this premise. Major retail PC sellers (BestBuy, Walmart, etc) believe there are basically 4 PC user types; Internet users (grandma), school computers (which also double as photo/music PCs), Media centric folks with more than 1 PC (targets for media center based PCs), and hard core gamers.

Here are the problems with this:

1, the PC set up for grandma and young children, the bottom of the line hunk of shit, is also usually underpowered even for that purpose, and simple upgrades (adding 1GB of RAM for example) actually costs more than simply buying the next level up in quality. Also, the basic PC is typically castrated in upgradability, making certain that as a person becomes more PC familiar, maybe adding a video camera and trying to make DVDs, will typically require PC replacement, not upgrade, because they fail to include a power suppy capable of supporting a graphics card (or fail to include a PCI X port for one at all). If it was clearly labled, this would not be an issue, but since it's sold side by side with other systems, only those who know PC specs and what they mean can tell the difference.

2, the "school computer" typically sold, especially notebooks intended to be used in colleges, typically don't meet the minimum requirements of the colleges... Most schools publish a system specification, and this typically (at least) involves the inclusion of a network OS (XP pro of Vista Pro), but none of these systems include that. Also, kids play games. Any "school PC" that doesn't at least include a graphics processor (shared or dedicated memory) is going to be useless to most kids in their perspectivce. These systems, also being at the low end of the price and component chart, typically are not equipped with enough RAM, or a fast enough (or big enough) HDD to handle the mass of video and music the kids will place on the machine. Again, buying this machine and upgrading it costs more than buying a better machine that already has the updates. Also, student packaged computers should come with the largest screens and resolutions possible. Kids will allways have a music player, internet page, e-mail, and chat room open while they're actually doing their work in a word processor or powerpoint session. They need dual screen or a 22" or larger high res display, again, which none of these packages include (or can't support due to embeded cheap graphic chips).

3, media center systems, boasting video capture, massive storage potential, and more, are usually strapped with slower hard drive and weak processors. The intent is that noone actually uses the PC, it just operates by itself as a stand alone media server, but the marketing folks ignore this just like they ignored the correct user base for Windows ME (Windows ME didn't suck, it did what Microsoft said it would do, but the marketing folks sold it to everyone, which was wrong!). Marketing is telling people not only to keep all, their videos on the media center, but that this is a real PC for someone to use too. Lets face it, trying to get this lower end CPU to crunch MPEG 4 video and rip a DVD while 2 other people are playing music from it and it's recording TV just doesn't work. The new Home Server model may acually correct this, but maybe not (I'm sure marketing will still screw this up). The Media Center machines also typically come with a vid card, but it's usually a bottom of the line dedicated card, and the power units in these PCs are also typically very close to maxed out, so replacing the card with a gaming card also means replacing the PS, which due to all the other included components in this small chassis is usually impossible. Also, the tuner only works for analog cable or OTA broadcast, so recording from cable TV or sattelite typically still requires a Tivo or real DVR, so the card's inclusion is just a waste of $100.

The hard core gamer... Well, about 5% of all PC gamers are "hard core" and need $2000 systems. The real gam

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[meringuoid]

RAM is cheap. It goes in a PC you probably use every day for lots of things which might benefit from the extra memory. But don't let me stop you from spending nearly 10 times that money on a console for one game that you'll probably finish once and forget about.

For the likes of Bioshock, it wouldn't just be the RAM. It'd be a faster CPU and video card, too - which would mean a new motherboard - which would mean I'm basically looking at a whole new PC. At which point I'll compare the price to a 360, and the console might well win out.

A few quid to bring it up to a full gig might well perk things up a bit, and let me make my Civ 4 worlds a bit bigger, but it won't give me the latest games. And given my usage patterns, my best upgrade right now is the 500GB external drive I've recently ordered, which will in short order contain an awful lot of fansubs :-)

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Lord Ender]

If I do decide that I absolutely have to play Bioshock, a 360 is a hell of a lot cheaper than building the gaming box o' doom.

If you had a decent PC to begin with, upgrading it to a high-end gaming PC would cost a lot less than a console, and you would have far superior graphics, too.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[TehZorroness]

It's a ballpark estimate. I didn't search through the dump to find all my sales receipts and determine the actual date of purchase.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[pommiekiwifruit]

Pah, my code at work takes up 800Mbytes just running idle... No I don't run it at home on my 512Mbyte PC :-)

And optimising the code would probably cost more (in my time) than buying the RAM...

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Real1tyCzech]

You're not realizing the main point. 512 is fine. But upping it to a fill GB will not "just allow you to load civ 4 faster". It will speed up menus, dialog loading, hell, OS loading (it will swap less during initial boot).

The list goes on.

RAM doesn't affect just game loading, it affects all of your computing. Want those directories of fansubs to show up a bit faster? As cheap as RAM is nowadays, it's a sin to have less than a GB considering how much it improves even general computing over 512.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[toddestan]

If it's a early 2003 machine, it's probably an AGP machine with DDR memory. You'll be looking at a new processor, new memory, new CPU, and new video card at the least. While you can do all of that for the price of a PS3, I might be more inclined to spend $50 or so and put more ram into it and stretch it out for another year or more.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 8 years old the same way you were conceived. A mistake.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[meringuoid]

RAM doesn't affect just game loading, it affects all of your computing. Want those directories of fansubs to show up a bit faster? As cheap as RAM is nowadays, it's a sin to have less than a GB considering how much it improves even general computing over 512.

I was writing an explanation of why that doesn't much matter - I browse directories in a terminal window most of the time, that kind of thing - but you know what? Fine. You guys win. Because before I finished writing it Firefox blew up and everything slowed to a crawl.

You don't by any chance own stock in crucial.com or anything, do you? :-)

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[freewaybear]

If you buy it here- http://www.zareason.com/shop/home.php , you can add more RAM cheaply. If you buy from this vendor, you can avoid giving walmart any money, if that's important to you.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[ThePhilips]

It will speed up menus, dialog loading, hell, OS loading (it will swap less during initial boot).

Normal Ubuntu installation uses about 120MB of RAM during booting. FYI. (For KDE IIRC it was about 200MB.)

"More resources is better" point is moot.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[drinkypoo]

Selling a PC with less than a gig (or 2, if it comes with Vista preinstalled) is downright criminal.

Why? Many people can get along fine with half a gig, especially running linux (though not so much gnome or kde...) but also running XP. Sure, both are much better with 1GB...

What I think is truly ridiculous is when a machine which does not support or does not need dual-channel memory comes with half its total maximum memory and all slots filled.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[vipz]

Most (if not all) games based on the Source Engine run fine on 4-5-year-old hardware. That is especially true for Portal, since graphically it is a very simple game. It doesn't have any vast landscapes or huge explosions. Also, the number of characters on screen is very limited at any given time. I would definitely give it a try if I were you.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Daddy?! You're late on your child support again!

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

> if I do decide that I absolutely have to play Bioshock, a 360 is a hell of a lot cheaper than building the gaming box o' doom.

Unlikely, especially so down the road. I just finished playing Bioshock demo on all high settings and good resolution on a budget machine that cost under $350 to put together including the graphics card.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[bigstrat2003]

WTF? 1 gig? Dude, I ran Windows XP on a damn laptop with 512 MB, played games on it, etc, etc, etc (and yes, I did have lots of stuff open at once), and never had any performance issues (discounting FPS issues brought on by my GeForce 2 video card). 512 MB is quite sufficient for any XP machine, only gamers should need 1 GB.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[bladesjester]

Counterexample for your "Only gamers need that" rant.

My laptop (2.4ghz, 512MB ram running XP) runs fine for most things. However, I have issues while running an IDE (Visual Studio or Eclipse), having a browser open, aim, and a couple of e-books up. It doesn't lock up, but it does tend to crawl at times(more so with Eclipse than Visual Studio).

Granted, that's not a normal user thing to do, but it's something other than playing games where the system resources are taxed quite heavily. Needless to say that I'm going to be dropping more ram into it in the near future.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will speed up menus, dialog loading, hell, OS loading (it will swap less during initial boot).

Normal Ubuntu installation uses about 120MB of RAM during booting. FYI. (For KDE IIRC it was about 200MB.)

"More resources is better" point is moot. Try installing Ubuntu into a virtual machine and set the memory to 96mb (you'll need to use the "alternate" installer or temporarily increase the ram to use the livecd). It will work fine. Browse the web with Firefox, use OpenOffice, etc. Overall it will be quite responsive*.

*Assuming you have a decent processor and virtual machines feel responsive when you give them, say, 512mb.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[jedidiah]

Ok. So DEVELOPERS, especially JAVA DEVELOPERS need more RAM.
No big surprise there. That's pretty dang obvious actually.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[LWATCDR]

I think that is changing.
My wife is into "Digital" scrap booking. Everything she does involves images that are a minimum of 300 dpi and 12"x12" in size.
She uses Gimp as do a good number of people on the message boards she goes to.
Then you have digital video. More and more people are getting digital camcorders and they will want to edit and author their videos.
So yes CPU power needs are going up even for your average users.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[ElleyKitten]

The only reason I've seen average users have a problem with 512 is when they have a bunch of spyware and adware, or otherwise had a bunch of programs running in the back they don't need. Install Avast, Windows Defender, and then run msconfig, startup->disable all. Then go to system->advanced->performance settings and uncheck all but the last one (the last one is the only one that makes a difference they'll notice). It'll go plenty fast enough then. Of course, if they're running a computer with Linux like this one they won't even need that, because Linux doesn't have spyware and it's programs usually use less memory (compare Pigeon to Yahoo Messenger). Unless you're running new games or high end programs, 512 is still fine.

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[meringuoid]

Most (if not all) games based on the Source Engine run fine on 4-5-year-old hardware. That is especially true for Portal, since graphically it is a very simple game. It doesn't have any vast landscapes or huge explosions. Also, the number of characters on screen is very limited at any given time. I would definitely give it a try if I were you.

It works very nicely, as it turns out. Never got my cake though, just a lot of personal abuse :-(

Re:Hardcore gamer?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You don't put tractor tyres on a Hyundai Excel, and you don't put Vista on any machine."

Fixed that for you.

Wait a sec

[downix]

I thought it was gentoo-based, not Ubuntu based.

Re:Wait a sec

[raydulany]

Nope, and in fact both of the articles linked in the first slashdot entry about this pc state that it is an Ubuntu variant. The wired blog is in fact titled "$200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-mart."

Re:Wait a sec

[Ian Alexander]

Maybe you're thinking of Zonbu? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonbu

Inotehr words,

[Fengpost]

The Machine is OK, gOS sucks, install your own.

Running ubuntu on VIA mini-ITX

[owlstead]

I've been running the default Ubuntu from a laptop harddisk. With this system, it will not be any problem running the default Ubuntu, provided that you get the display drivers to run. Currently I'm stuck on VESA mode again, after trying almost anything to get the video to display anything other. The upgrade to 7.10 was the reason for this, upgrade to X means reinstalling video drivers again. Since I've also tried various compile/install methods, I may never get my system back on, which is the main reason for abandoning linux on the desktop so far...

Re:Running ubuntu on VIA mini-ITX

[JamesTRexx]

No problem on mine, but then I've not bothered upgrading from Dapper Drake.
I use the via driver, running 800x600x24 on the TV out (PAL) and only the cpu intensive H.264 codec is too much for the 1GHz cpu.

I do plan on either upgrading Ubuntu or installing FreeBSD 7.0 though, depending on how good the driver for the Terratec audio card is.

Re:Running ubuntu on VIA mini-ITX

[asm2750]

I haven't had an issue on my via SP13000, you might want to read the community doc on openchrome, and just set the monitor config to plug and play.

Unprofessional Review

[ozmanjusri]

Reading that, you begin to understand why professionals get paid to review products.

It's full of inconsistencies;

• The guy claims to be experienced with Ubuntu, but didn't know to type his user password at the sudo prompt.
• He manually installs the Flash plugin and calls it unintuitive, when all you need to do is go to a website with Flash content, and it'll automatically install for you.
• He can't find the "log out" menu item...
• He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.

And so it goes on. There's almost no real review of what's installed, how easy it is to use, or even how to solve the problems he encounters.

About the only thing you learn from him is that a little knowledge is dangerous.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Anonymous Coward]

If the reviewer didn't know and couldn't work it out, how is anybody buying it expected to know?

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Anonymous Coward]

The same way people "know" Windows. Lots of trial and error.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Anonymous Coward]

You also learn why Linux isn't ready for normal users.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[ozmanjusri]

how is anybody buying it expected to know?

Because it's not very hard? Because it's explained in the pamphlet that comes with the PC?

If you're planning on reviewing a product, you need to put in enough effort to be sure you've got the basics right. This guy didn't.

Use the Start button or right click anywhere on the desktop and select "My GoS", then "Shutdown" from the popup menu.

There's a much better review of the OS here anyway.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[philicorda]

It looks like a clash between old and new Linux.
I used to use Slackware or Gentoo as they worked.

I put Suse on my computer to see what it was like, and the sound was not working.
My first reaction was to open a console and lsmod, then cat /proc/asound/cards etc.
The card was there, but the modules were loading in the wrong order, so the motherboard soundcard was loading first and being used by default. So, I started to edit /etc/modprobe.conf

My friend, who does not use Linux, was watching me do this and I explained what I was doing.
He said 'Why not look in the menu?'

In the menu there was a way to set up the sound card in Yast and select the default.
For some reason, my technical long term Linux user brain never even considered this as a first and obvious thing to do. I think I probably acted like this guy did, instead seeing how the distro was designed to be used, or reading any documentation, I just assumed I knew best and was going to fix it by brute force.

I think it's perhaps a throwback to when the autoconfig stuff was a bit dodgy on Linux and I really did not trust it much, so even if it was there I'd ignore it, and it got to be a habit. Nowadays I use Ubuntu and am happier to let the distro take care of configuration and the little details.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[rs232]

'He can't find the "log out" menu item...'

On this Xubuntu brings up a menu or press the power button and it goes into shutdown mode.

'He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem'

Anyone here suceeded in getting the WMP54G card working on Ubuntu, perhaps you could help the man out ...

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Kjella]

I think you can summarize this as "terminal user using modern GUI". Since obviously he knows to use his sudo password at the command prompt, my only possible conclusion is the he's never encountered it in a GUI and didn't recognize it as a sudo prompt.

He wants to install some flash games (I don't know what he's talking about, but surely it should be handled by the package manager?) not any website. It's not intuitive that you need to browse the web to get some offline(?) flash game working. If it's online he's just smoking crack. And again the solution is a terminal, not a package manager.

"Log out" sounds the same way, why know where a button is when you can manage it by terminal.

Finally, a bad case of "this isn't the tool I like, and if I install the tool I like everything will be so much better"... only it wasn't. WTF kind of improvement is that? "Now it doesn't work, but now at least it doesn't work with a tool I know". Given the rest of the review, I'm kinda surprised he didn't hack a text file from the terminal.

If anything, this is a review of how horrible it is to have someone way too knowledgable to actually use the point-and-click tools to try to mimic a normal user. Nevermind that the first thing he does is to realize he's bought a machine he can't use out of the box, and start dicking around to install extras, which a normal user wouldn't. The whole review sums up as: If you know exactly what dark incantations to write at the command line, why bother trying to find any other way?

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll have to excuse me if I don't waste my time thinking that a review on linux.com is going to be fairer than a review from an independant observer.

I just find it funny that you say "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" and then expect people with that amount of knowledge to jump onto a Linux system and fix their network issues. Oh sorry, fixing network issues was in the pamphlet, right?

Judging from that and your earlier pathetic "installing Vista is criminal" jab, it's pretty plain that you're just another one of the zealots. It's kind of sad to see people who advocate software with such terminal intensity that they can't handle some constructive criticism.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[ozmanjusri]

Oh sorry, fixing network issues was in the pamphlet, right?

If you read TFA, you'd realise the guy created his own network problem, so yes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[bball99]

Nowadays I use Ubuntu and am happier to let the distro take care of configuration and the little details. - until the distro won't help you? :-) - although i gotta agree here... i would have gone the same route and initially tried brute force... but i have found that Ubuntu (and kernel module maturity) hasn't been the greatest w/my laptop's wifi, video 3D acceleration and support of a USB-hosted PVR...

Re:Unprofessional Review

[lakin]

He manually installs the Flash plugin and calls it unintuitive, when all you need to do is go to a website with Flash content, and it'll automatically install for you. Well, he doesnt say its unintuitive, he just doesnt try any way other than installing it in the terminal. It was when he said that I knew this review was completely useless. And then again in his summary he says

On the other hand, I was also being repeatedly frustrated with my attempts to get things done by the standard methods I'd use on a normal Ubuntu system. Im pretty sure Walmart are not aiming this pc at the average ubuntu user. I would have been much more interested in how usable this machine is by people with limited computer knowledge. Can they find the major apps, do any errors crop up, etc.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[mcarp]

Except that he SAID HE WAS AN UBUNTU EXPERIENCED PERSON. I was aghast when the reviewer said he couldnt figure out how to shutdown the machine from the ui especially since he's experienced with ubuntu! While I admit that not a lot of computer illiterates would make it very far, the reviewer cant both claim experience of ubuntu and unable to find that shutting down the system from the ui includes a trip to the logout thingy.

OTOH, I find the jab 'intalling Vista is criminal' to be pretty funny and a good comment on the state of the industry. Shame on you m$. Now of course you'll be looking for zealots, linux ones I suppose. Sorry my 2 main machines are win xp pro sp2 as are my wife's and 2 kids machines. I just happen to have an ubuntu box and 2 freebsd ones. fbsd ftw! for the last decade server wise but frankly, I still prefer the windows desktop in user land. PC hosted unix-a-like has become much better but guys, please drag in the game makers and user friendly designers or it'll be m$ forever

Re:Unprofessional Review

[DrXym]

About the only thing you learn from him is that a little knowledge is dangerous.

If a moderately experienced user can't figure things out, what hope does a novice have? I have yet to see any Linux distribution that I would consider even remotely comparable to Vista or OS X. Ubuntu is definitely one of the friendliest, but there are still far too many pitfalls for new users, especially when it comes to configuring hardware.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[philicorda]

yeah. It's not really a good thing that I expected have to do it by hand.
I think in a way it's because the basics are the same on any Linux distro, but the gui tools are often different, so I stuck to what I knew.
I agree there is still quite a gulf between hardware that has drivers for Linux, and hardware that will either just work out of the box or has a simple gui to set it up that is included in the popular distros.
Most of my hardware is getting so old that it falls into the 'works out of the box' category. :)

Re:Unprofessional Review

[stewbacca]

I popped up a terminal window and installed it using "sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree."

Point made? As much as I'd like to see a viable, novice-friendly version of Linux, all I get is review after review just like this one -- somebody with moderate computing experience floundering around in some non user-friendly Linux variant.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[delaine1975]

Could not agree more. It's annoying to read more and more posts from Linux "experts" who don't distinguish between their OS and WM experience. This is not Windows, folks...

Re:Unprofessional Review

[vtcodger]

***The guy claims to be experienced with Ubuntu, but didn't know to type his user password at the sudo prompt.***

I certainly wouldn't criticize anyone who has never encountered sudo's strange default configuration for assuming that a security feature popping up an administrative password box during setup would want the root password rather than the (pointless, no?) user password. Confused me also when I first encountered it years ago. Does Ubuntu ship with the default sudo configuration? Betcha not. (I'm a Slackware-xfce user myself).

***He manually installs the Flash plugin and calls it unintuitive, when all you need to do is go to a website with Flash content, and it'll automatically install for you.***

My reading was that he thought that Flash should have been preinstalled on a consumer PC. Seemed reasonable to me. Still seems reasonable to me. Is there some sort of licensing thing that mandates that Flash be user installed?

***He can't find the "log out" menu item...***

Looking at the screen shot, neither can I. This is supposed to be an OS for non-technical users, no? His point is probably that a non-technical user is likely going to turn the silly thing off with the power switch or power cord. That would be OK if this were a sensibly designed consumer device, but being a computer it almost certainly isn't OK. I'm with him. When I encounter a "control" panel that looks like that, I install something I can understand. (BTW Is the '"F" you' at the bottom right end of the panel some sort of oddball joke? Almost makes me want to buy one of these things just so I can click it).

***He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.***

Ehrr, no. He thought that the Exalt didn't give him proper access to his WiFi configuration whereas he believed (correctly apparently) that Gnome Network Manager would.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Anonymous Coward]

I was aghast when the reviewer said he couldnt figure out how to shutdown the machine from the ui especially since he's experienced with ubuntu!

Um, the point of that is that the gOS UI is not remotely similar to the Ubuntu UI, and he was criticising the gOS UI for making it hard to find the shutdown option. Can you even read?

Re:Unprofessional Review

[mikelieman]

I think you can summarize this as "terminal user using modern GUI". Since obviously he knows to use his sudo password at the command prompt, my only possible conclusion is the he's never encountered it in a GUI and didn't recognize it as a sudo prompt.

YES! I installed gOS on a laptop to play around with it, and I got caught up with "Password for admin tasks? It didn't ask me for a password for admin tasks when I setup my user password. I don't think this *has* a root password." It took a while, until I realized it was a sudo prompt.

I don't know if the printed materials accompanying the product make this clear, but sticking a "SUDO" label on the dialog box might help.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[that this is not und]

Part of the reason I am sticking with NetBSD is that as all the Linux-based OSes vie to be more and more 'user friendly' the thick layers of obfuscated mess that their GUI configuration tools represent become more and more complex. I've loaded up some of the 'new' Linuxes (I used to use Slackware back in the mid 90's before I discovered NetBSD) and it's another 'doze experience except with less polish.

Give me the fricking textfiles in /etc and stay the hell outta my way.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[ben(zen)]

please drag in the game makers I'm hoping for the same thing. Does anyone know anything about the Valve job posting, and what its repercussions are? Also, I can't wait for UT3~~~!

Re:Unprofessional Review

[bcrowell]

Hi, I'm the author of the review.

The guy claims to be experienced with Ubuntu, but didn't know to type his user password at the sudo prompt.
You have a valid point there. I normally use fluxbox, however, not gnome, and I normally do administrative stuff as root, not using sudo. Also, it demanded the administrator's password even though I hadn't initiated any administrative action other than logging in for the first time. Remember, this review is also talking about what the experience would be like for someone who's in Wal-Mart's target audience.

He can't find the "log out" menu item...
That's because there is none. Here you just didn't read the review carefully enough. It isn't Gnome, it's gOS's custom flavor of Enlightenment. There's no "log out" menu item in the WM. As I also explained in the review, they replaced the normal gdm login manager with their own, and it also doesn't have the normal menus, either.

He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.
Again, you don't seem to have read the article very carefully. As explained in the article, Gnome has a GUI called Gnome Network Manager, which I'd used successfully in the past to get the same wifi chipset working on Ubuntu, without resorting to the command line. gOS has something called Exalt, which failed with an error message when I tried to run it by clicking on its icon.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the exact same experience last night when messing around with VMware tools in Ubuntu. My network connection stopped working as a result and I tried several things with no luck. The fix was going to the Network menu under administration and enabling the wired network connection with DHCP, worked right away. Still no idea how this got disabled in the first place though.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[bcrowell]

I'm the author of the review.

how is anybody buying it expected to know?
Because it's not very hard? Because it's explained in the pamphlet that comes with the PC?
I have the poster that came with it right here in front of me. It's not explained there.

Use the Start button
I tried that. I didn't get the menu items you're talking about.

or right click anywhere on the desktop and select "My GoS", then "Shutdown" from the popup menu.
That's good to know, but the documentation never suggests right-clicking on the desktop.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Provocateur]

He said 'Why not look in the menu?'

You left out, Well, that was what I was planning to do next, actually. Hey, isn't that Paris on the telly?

Re:Unprofessional Review

[piojo]

He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.
Again, you don't seem to have read the article very carefully. As explained in the article, Gnome has a GUI called Gnome Network Manager, which I'd used successfully in the past to get the same wifi chipset working on Ubuntu, without resorting to the command line. gOS has something called Exalt, which failed with an error message when I tried to run it by clicking on its icon. I think this is a pretty reasonable thing to do. Actually, I did something more extreme--I installed ubuntu just to get Gnome Network Manager and nm-applet (because I didn't know what those two programs were called).

Re:Unprofessional Review

[sowth]

That is a bad example. I don't know about gOS, but Ubuntu comes with Synaptic installed. No apt-get command line required. Even though I think it is a piece of crap, any MS Windows user would probably be comfortable with it.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[sootman]

Ben--thanks for the review. I'm considering getting one of these, either to use as a small server (like this guy describes) or to take out the guts and put them into a more size-efficient case. I would *love* to see some pics of the inside of this machine to see how small the components are and/or how much free space there is inside. Have you taken any?

Re:Unprofessional Review

[sgtrock]

I can't recall where I saw it, but I read a review that did say that the case was pretty much empty. Apparently, someone decided that Walmart customers would equate "big" with "powerful." They even had one photo showing that you could look right _through_ the case.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Kelz]

Perhaps you should've RTFohwait.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading that, you begin to understand why professionals get paid to review products. Anything that requires a professional to use/review, probably shouldn't be sold at Walmart for 200 bucks.

About the only thing you learn from him is that a little knowledge is dangerous. It would seem, (From my own time trying to figure out enough about *nix to make the switch, and from reading forum, after forum, with some topics reaching several dozen pages, and hundreds, if not thousands of posts), that most people attempting to run *nux are not professionals. If this fellow had some trouble spots, and probably with more knowledge than your average newbie to *nix, then how is your average person who occasionally uses Outlook Express at work going to do with it?

Re:Unprofessional Review

[bcrowell]

I can't recall where I saw it, but I read a review that did say that the case was pretty much empty.
Right, I actually mentioned that in the review. The case is 90% air.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[bcrowell]

Ben--thanks for the review. I'm considering getting one of these, either to use as a small server (like this guy describes) or to take out the guts and put them into a more size-efficient case. I would *love* to see some pics of the inside of this machine to see how small the components are and/or how much free space there is inside. Have you taken any?
If you're going to do that, I don't really see the point of buying this machine. Just buy a micro-ATX motherboard and a small case that's designed for a micro-ATX motherboard. You'll save money, and you'll avoid throwing the tower case in a landfill.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words you tried to use it like you would Windows.

Re:Unprofessional Review

[ozmanjusri]

That's good to know, but the documentation never suggests right-clicking on the desktop.

Well, you're sort of right - it's not precisely explained.

It does say

This is your Main Menu. You can access it by clicking anywhere on your desktop with the left mouse button or by hitting the Menu key on your keyboard. I'd suggest that's a fairly powerful hint...

Re:Unprofessional Review

[brahmix]

I tested the Live CD.

In my opinion (being a longtime gentoo fan)- gOs is great for the average person.
Not gamers (really- if you wanna play games, get XP on good hardware!)
Not number crunchers or graphic designers- low-end PC means just that- LOW-END.

If you wanna surf the net, blog, facebook- the stuff my cheating-soon-to-be-x-wife would use- gOs is awesome. Write a doc, read docs- maybe use a spreadsheet.. you know- basic stuff. Connect to ole digicam...scan some stuff..

Install software- in the menu! Synaptic! But what would you install?

On the point of low end- I have a 600MHz P3 with 256M ram running Ubuntu at work- and it out performs a 1800MHz P4 with 512M ram and XP. Ubuntu rocks. I got this ubuntu box because the stupid windows machine was driving me up the walls with the persistent click-and-wait discipline!
NOTE: out-perform == no click-and-wait, actual time that I can use the bloody machine- not to be confused with --firefox starts up in 10 seconds on Ubuntu and 14 seconds on XP-- even though that is true too.

To say that you wanted to install a wifi card and it didn't work, but worked on another ubuntu machine... is like.. saying that the sun shines because the earth is round.
Why blame gOS? (it is ubuntu) That it didn't work- that is a valid complaint.

I rather liked e17- the default green is just too much- so I changed the theme- much better.

Where is the breakdown of what IS there? The review should take that into account.
Could you connect to an ADSL router- did XINE play your videos, the default audio player- mp3 ready? You know- stuff that the normal person will do- bittorrent installed? You see- that is reviewing a low-end-for-the-average-person-pc-and-os.

Besides, who cares if Google soils the desktop with their stuff-- it is gOS... like in GOOGLE OS.
That would be like M$ not parading their name in Windows-- or use the word windows. Silly Billy!

Re:Unprofessional Review

[bcrowell]

It does say This is your Main Menu. You can access it by clicking anywhere on your desktop with the left mouse button or by hitting the Menu key on your keyboard. I'd suggest that's a fairly powerful hint...
Yes, but as I've explained to you several times now, the shutdown option didn't appear in my main menu. I did finally figure out what was going on, and added a note to the review, with screenshots showing how two different versions of the menu are shown under different conditions.

Also available at ZaReason

[Helmholtz Coil]

If you're desperate (?) to get your hands on one of these, I noticed the other day that ZaReason's got them too. Don't know if they're 100% the same, but they're the same price and so possibly worth a look.

Re:Also available at ZaReason

[tkid]

Yeah, I like ZaReason's description from their site, specifically this one: "Preloaded with: OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, gMail, Meebo, Skype, Wikipedia, GIMP, Blogger, YouTube, Xing Movie Player, Rhythmbox, Faqly, Facebook, all for ease of use on start-up." WTF, you mean they preloaded gMail, Blogger, YouTube and Facebook.. I know most have the internet but listing these as preloaded seems a little out of place. Should say internet subscription required.

Windows adverts in a Linux review ..

[rs232]

The advert above says 'See why the City of Indianapolis chose Windows Server over Linux'. Luckly clicking on the 'Compare' link does nothing on this Xubuntu with free-flash installed. Is curious as to why such adverts turn up in a review of the $200 Wal-Mart Linux PC ..

Re:Windows adverts in a Linux review ..

[realdodgeman]

That is because Microsoft has bought ads on sites with the keyword "Linux" as a part of their FUD campaign also known as Compare. For more FUD, visit Microsoft.com/compare.

Re:Windows adverts in a Linux review ..

[rs232]

And Slashdot took their filthy lucre, for shame TacoMan ..

Re:Windows adverts in a Linux review ..

[Anonymous Coward]

And Slashdot took their filthy lucre, for shame TacoMan ..

Isn't it ironic that Microsoft is paying for ads on a site where people are pretty much immune to them?

Re:Windows adverts in a Linux review ..

[Doug52392]

I've noticed that on dozens of Linux and anti-Microsoft websites. I always ask "Why in the hell would Microsoft waste their money advertising Windows Server if everyone on those websites is going to know how to turn a Linux box into a kickass server?"

Re:Windows adverts in a Linux review ..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&q=FUD

LOL!

Let me Summarize

[vtcodger]

Let me summarize the article for those who won't/can't read it.

The machine is not actually available in some Walmart stores at this time, but you can mail order it and get it shipped to your local store (aside: No way in hell -- I'd rather drive in Boston than navigate the parking lot at that place). Everex has this in other stores besides Walmart now. What Walmart has in your local Walmart store maybe is a $300 version that runs Vista. A Monitor is extra in all cases so it's really a $400-500 PC.

Hardware is fine -- really. Power consumption is OK. Not great, but OK. OS has some rough edges including, but not limited to, no obvious way to shut the thing down. The author scrapped the included gOS and installed vanilla Ubuntu which is, he thinks, what most users should do.

All things considered he says, it's OK except for the OS.

Re:Let me Summarize

[ReeceTarbert]

All things considered he says, it's OK except for the OS.

I think the OS is good enough for (what I imagine is) the intended audience.

Granted, the desktop is a bit too green and maybe too much Google oriented but, let's face it, anyone who's been using computers at least a little as heard of Google and the gazillion services on offer, so it doesn't take very long to figure out what those icons at the bottom of the screen are supposed to do.

Also, in addition to the typical "OS on a cheap computer for mail and stuff" scenario, I think gOS might be quite useful in internet cafes: most of the applications needed by the average user are there, and there's very little to maintain -- or break.

RT
--
Your Bookmarks. Anywhere. Anytime.

Google turf...

[excelsior_gr]

From the article:

"None of this was anywhere near as annoying as all the crapware that comes installed on many Windows boxes, but it did give me a little bit of the same feeling that my eyeballs were being treated as a commodity."

What is the difference?

Anyway, I prefer Google than Microsoft, but then again that's just my opinion...

Re:Google turf...

[Arccot]

From the article: "None of this was anywhere near as annoying as all the crapware that comes installed on many Windows boxes, but it did give me a little bit of the same feeling that my eyeballs were being treated as a commodity."

What is the difference?

As far as the Google toolbar install, I agree that's rather over the top. There's just no need for the distro to install it, since most users will not want it. Setting the default homepage to Google makes complete sense to me. It has to be set to something, and the top search engine seems like an obvious choice. iGoogle is just a customizable front page for Google.

It sounds like the only difference is quantity of junk software installed by default. I just bought a cheap eMachines for my parents, and it was amazing what it had installed and set to run on start. An audio control panel that did the same things as Windows with a different skin, a tool for eMachines to send popup ads whenever they want, and 3 other tools I couldn't even figure out what the point of them was. I'm not sure if there's more, that's jsut what was running in the system tray.

If gOS computers become popular, expect the same quantity of junkware showing up on them.

512M of ram?

[www.sorehands.com]

It is cheap to add another 1GB of ram. Most users want to be able to run a word processor, look at pictures, and surf the internet.

Most of the stores just keep pushing faster and faster machines on people, more than what they need. Vista helps with that being such a pig.

Re:512M of ram?

[MMC Monster]

Actually, just realized a month ago that my workhorse machine at home has 512MB ram. I use it for photo editing and light video editing under Ubuntu Linux. I occassionally run WinXP as a virtual machine, as well. I also run my home website on the machine (basically just a photo album of a few hundred images), and stream music to a home internet appliance (a squeezebox, by slimdevices).

I consider myself an advanced home user, and I don't need 1GB ram. In fact, the only things that would probably get more responsive for me with the extra memory is likely the video editing and my WinXP virtual machine (which I rarely use anyway). I'd rather use the extra money to buy my daughter a child-friendly mouse or trackball.

Re:512M of ram?

[tommertron]

Sorry, this probably doesn't belong on a public discussion, but I'm really curious about a couple things you mentioned:

1) What video editing software are you using for Ubuntu? I've been looking high and low and can't find any.

2) What method did you use to get WinXP as a virtual machine? I've seen various different instructions for this out there, but just wanted to get an idea of what software someone used to do it successfully.

Re:512M of ram?

[sgbett]

Actually, I just realised that I have legs. I use them for many things such as walking about.

I consider myself an advanced walker, and I don't need to take the bus.

In fact, the only things that it would probably get quicker for me by spending the extra money is likely the 13 mile trip to work each day, and the visit to foreign relatives 64 miles away (who I rarely go and see). I'd rather use the extra money to buy my daughter a picture of me so she doesn't forget who I am because I spend 8 hours a day comp^Hmuting.

Buy some ram dude! sure you don't *need* it, but think of the children!

Re:512M of ram?

[spikedvodka]

response to (2)

VMWare, works perfectly for me

Re:512M of ram?

[budgenator]

With 320MB I end up in swap-hell every so ofren, I'd get more ram but the machine is so old it wouldn't be useable after the next upgrade.

Re:512M of ram?

[westlake]

Most of the stores just keep pushing faster and faster machines on people, more than what they need. Vista helps with that being such a pig.

The Geek never quite "gets" the home market.

The technical hobbyist and the hard core action gamer are only narrow slices of that market, but that doesn't mean the applications others use at home are undemanding.

The home PC is Internet Radio and TV. Home Video. Digital Photography. The pocket 720p HD camcorder from Walmart starts at under $200.

The USB HD tuner card about the same.

You'll want to edit that video before posting it to YouTube.

Re:512M of ram?

[J0nne]

2) What method did you use to get WinXP as a virtual machine? I've seen various different instructions for this out there, but just wanted to get an idea of what software someone used to do it successfully. I can't speak for the OP, but either Virtualbox or VMWare server/player work fine (they're both in the repositories). I'd recommend Virtualbox, because it's open source.

Re:512M of ram?

[MMC Monster]

1) I use kino. It's in the Ubuntu repositories, and also available at http://www.getdeb.net/ . For simple video editing, it's really a breeze to use.

Video authoring software (to create the final DVD with menus) that is quite good is DVD Styler.

2) I use vmware server. It's a free download from vmware.com, and free for non-commercial use. When you register, you get a serial number emailed to you.

Re:512M of ram?

[inflex]

It's commercial - but I bought and use MainActor (made/sold by Main Concept - there is a demo version too, leaves a watermark on the output).

Re:512M of ram?

[White Shade]

Yeah it seemed like for a very long time, making the RAM upgrade to 512mb would provide significant performance gains, even for a home user, but above that it started to tail off in terms of noticable improvement.

Nowadays, considering using firefox for a couple days without closing it, and with dozens of tabs open, makes firefox alone chew up 400mb or more, having a gig or so probably helps too.

With regards to photo/video editing, I would presume that unless individual frames and individual photos are bigger than your free physical memory, the actual speed limiting factor would be bus bandwidth, memory bandwidth, the specifics of the CPU cache, and most importantly, HDD speed. It doesn't matter if you can fit dozens of frames in RAM if you have to crawl at a snails pace to get them there! (oh, and raw CPU speed, of course, can't forget about that.)

Re:512M of ram?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista helps with that being such a pig.

But at least it is a pig with lipstick.

Re:512M of ram?

[PReDiToR]

VMware Server is working perfectly under gOS on my SO's machine, which has 512Mb. Obviously this makes the VM a fairly slow machine because you can't give it the whole 512, but it runs.

Until recently she was completely unaware of FOSS, now she uses openSuSE on this laptop, and on the back of that I dropped gOS onto her desktop machine when the WinXP registry crashed AGAIN.

I threw VMware Server on there and installed XP Home under it with the XP key on the side of her beige box so that she can use Photoshop.

Except for having gOS tell her that she had to edit the apt repository file to get rid of "googlepc.com" and change it to "thinkgos.com" she has been able to run and update everything on there.

To be fair, she isn't a power user, but she has OOo and Gmail, so there isn't a lot of difference for her.

Re:512M of ram?

[MMC Monster]

I would love to see from mozilla.org some stats about how long the average person keeps firefox running. This thing about memory usage after hours of use is something (I feel) only effects fringe users.

Re:512M of ram?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this is the spot I was in with my old machine. It's a 5 year old 1GHz G4 PowerBook with 512 MB of PC-2100 ram. I looked at upgrading, but a gigabyte chip never went under $100 or so, whereas DDR2 is half that or less now. I found myself with some extra money, so I got a 24 inch iMac. I'll upgrade the ram (to four gigabytes) next month.

Re:512M of ram?

[ColdWetDog]

You'll want to edit that video before posting it to YouTube.

From what I've seen on YouTube, it's not immediately obvious that anyone else agrees with you.

Re:512M of ram?

[Real1tyCzech]

VirtualBox.

Use Synaptic to grab it. Easy as pie.

Re:512M of ram?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would Firefox's memory usage bring about fringe users?

Re:512M of ram?

[beav007]

The only time I close FF between reboots is when something goes terribly wrong. For the most part, FF stays running with 8+ tabs 24/7 for up to 2 weeks (yay Windows)...

Re:512M of ram?

[Anonymous Coward]

But at least it is a pig with lipstick.

And herpes.

Re:512M of ram?

[Calinous]

No, it ain't cheap.
      Most cheap mainboards use dual channel memory with two DIMM slots. And come with two DIMMs.
      So, to upgrade from 512MB to 1GB, you would drop the 512MB and buy 1GB.
On not so expensive mainboards, you would usually have four DIMM slots, and upgrading would be just adding two more DIMMs

Re:512M of ram?

[zerkon]

I rather wouldn't... it would mean firefox is phoning home and telling the mothership things about me.

as far as usage goes, I've had firefox open with anywhere between 5 and 15 tabs for the last 24 hours and it's currently using 140mb.

a real review

[Anonymous Coward]

the hardware is fine to run windows 2000 or a cleaned up xp along with many year old+ games.

so grab one cheap. make it a fileserver or a terminal for old people. web, email, office. or a second pc you can play on while your real one is working hard.

its nothing really damm amazing. but it is $200 for a full pc.

In the long term, Vista will help humanity

[Bananatree3]

Here's my case: As you can see now, many OEMs have upgraded even their low-end computer specifications to meet Vista's demands. This means minimum 512mb ram, 1.x Ghz processor, etc. With their upgrade to Vista, their distributed-medicine computing calculations have also gotten a boost. Hence, the help to humanity! (And, if they decide to switch back to XP because of Vista being a behemouth, which many are doing, this gives just that much more resources to humanity!)

Re:In the long term, Vista will help humanity

[cduffy]

Here's my case: As you can see now, many OEMs have upgraded even their low-end computer specifications to meet Vista's demands. This means minimum 512mb ram, 1.x Ghz processor, etc. With their upgrade to Vista, their distributed-medicine computing calculations have also gotten a boost. Hence, the help to humanity!

What you're forgetting about is opportunity cost. Money being spent to buy higher-end hardware could instead be going to a myriad of other purposes -- or simply enabling people to buy more computers (or, turning that around, enabling more people to buy computers). Artificially increasing system requirements effectively creates a price floor, pricing the low-end consumer out of the market.

To go the reductio ad absurdum route, consider this claim: we should legally prevent anyone from buying anything less than a $20,000 32-processor parallel workstation, because humanity will benefit from the spare processing power.

Artificially raising the cost of computers (by law or by unnecessarily inflated system requirements) is harmful in the same way that raising taxes is harmful: Individuals are denied the opportunity to optimize for the most effective use of their funds.

Re:In the long term, Vista will help humanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Your email address concerns me. Shouldn't you be adding "slashdot" to both sides to keep the equation balanced?

VIA UniChrome Pro IGP Graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody have that graphics card? Is it any good? Are the drivers open-source? I heard that it supports some nifty Motion Compensation (somewhere on the Wikipedia) ... is that supported? How's 3D? I wouldn't expect much, just maybe Q3A (quite an old game) to run well. What about Beryl/Compiz?

Available at my store...

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

Okay, I am telling on myself here. I work at a Walmart. My store has these in stock currently, but just two. Not sure how long we have had them, but the department manager decided not to put them out in favor of the expensive Gateway's that noone ever buys. Under the rare circumstance that I was allowed to be unchained from the game case, I got the honor of finding stuff to put on display tonight. I saw these and grabbed the store's assistant manager, told him the buzz of them and asked if there was any reason why I couldn't put them out. He said "do it". Now I am wondering if they will be bought up before I return from my weekend off, and if they go to tech savvy people who know what they are, or cheap dolts who grab the lowest priced stuff on the shelf. (Durabrand!)

Re:Available at my store...

[mh1997]

Okay, I am telling on myself here. I work at a Walmart.

After reading billions of articles/posts about evil Walmart on the internet, I have to ask a stupid question.

Which Walmart employee are you - the guy that is exploited for low wages with no benefits because of your lack of education or the guy that is destroying small town America?

One thing this does tell you

[SmallFurryCreature]

It shows that a 'random' person couldn't get the system/OS to work according to his wishes. To be really fair, you really should ask yourselve wether a 'random' person could get other system/OS combo's to work. This includes asking yourselve how well the average random person would deal with installing windows. If you ever had to deal with tech support you would know that most users stumble just as hard with MS software as with OSX and other unixes. Hell, people stumble with their toasters.

To be specific, the SUDO bit had me wondering too, but as I am neither familiar with Ubuntu or sudo (don't use either on my own linux systems) I really can't comment. If Ubuntu does use sudo a lot then it is odd, but does the box say you need to be an experienced Linux user? Couldn't they have provided a help function? Please type in your password?

As for flash, it would have been better if it had worked out of the box, but yes, recently installing it from your browser when prompted has been known to work. This however was not always the case, especially for Opera users.

Enlightenment is a WM that does things a bit differently and the screenshots make it clear it is NOT a straight windows layout copy like KDE and Gnome use (By default). Perhaps he really just didn't know how to get it. Under E17 (The sequel) it is left mouse click on the desktop -> system Might be confusing to a person who normally would NEVER left-click anywhere on the desktop.

He didn't think it would fix a network problem, he just couldn't get the tool too work. That is different. If you know how to setup your network in Windows XP and not in Vista then installing XP again 'fixes' your problem. Granted it does sound like "oh they are not doing everything 100% like I am used too, it sucks" but that is how most users are.

So is it a good review? No, but it does tell us something and that is that Joe Average is a moron who doesn't like change and that it is very hard to develop an OS for that guy. See it not as a review but one of those usability reports usability experts so love to go one about. It might help you to develop an OS for average user.

And no windows ain't that OS either and NEITHER is OSX (before the Apple fanboys pipe up), if ANY OS out there was the perfect OS for the clueless I wouldn't constantly be asked by the clueless to help with their machine.

Recently I had to help people setup their network under Vista and OSX, and none of the users seemed to know how to do it. None of them make it very clear or easy. (Why does Vista break with DHCP run on linux anyway?)

I do agree with your end conclusion, give me a clueless user who knows he/she is clueless anyday, they ask, you answer, they listen, problem fixed. The ones who think they know a little ARGUE with you over the solution. ARGH! If you know it better, why ask? But the horrors of support is another rant.

Re:One thing this does tell you

[stewbacca]

Calling somebody "clueless" lends nothing to the credibility of your post. If anything, this review shows that, a) Wal-mart is missing the target audience, and b) Linux isn't ready for Joe Consumer. Just because you think the reviewer is dumb really change anything.

The whole article is a LIE

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot find a computer without Windows in the stores. The monopoly blah blah, you know.

Re:The whole article is a LIE

[Real1tyCzech]

You mean....except for this one.

Right?

Re:The whole article is a LIE

[aichpvee]

The summary says they're sold out, so no.

Re:The whole article is a LIE

[jwo7777777]

"sold out of stores"

Poor choice of words in the summary.

"sold in brick and mortar WalMarts" would be better. (assuming my spelling is ok)

Re:The whole article is a LIE

[Anonymous Coward]

"sold out of stores"
Poor choice of words in the summary. Actually "sold out" means "all stock has been sold", i.e. brick-and-mortar Walmart stores can't sell you one because they don't have any more.

Re:The whole article is a LIE

[jwo7777777]

The summary's sentence structure was such that I couldn't tell whether they were trying to indicate a "sold-out" or "sold from" status.

I actually had to read other articles on the issue to find that WM had indeed "sold-out" of the item.

Missing the Target

[stewbacca]

This thing is a miss, because the people it is oriented to won't understand:

I popped up a terminal window and installed it using "sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree."

Ironically enough, that statement, coupled with the Author's remark --

I didn't spend any time trying to figure out if a naive user would have been able to get through this step.

-- is why Linux probably won't ever become a mainstream player.

Re:Missing the Target

[Anonymous Coward]

So, sold-out linux boxes at Walmart isnt mainstream enough for you eh? What, are you waiting for them to turn up at 7-Eleven?

Re:Missing the Target

[mspohr]

Being a somewhat technical person he knew he needed Flash and how to install it from the repository. The average clueless newbie running this machine will browse to a Flash website and get a message that they need to install Flash along with a button to press to install it... same result... they get Flash. This is also the same way that IE on Windows works to install Flash the last time I used IE.

Re:Missing the Target

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people are too stupid to notice that they don't need to use the terminal, you mean?

Re:Missing the Target

[dbcad7]

you bring up 2 issues...

I popped up a terminal window and installed it using "sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree."
I didn't spend any time trying to figure out if a naive user would have been able to get through this step.

These are both issues related to the author, not Linux or this distro.. He could have just as easily installed with Synaptic, or as the other poster says, the web site... I also notice you using html tags, which is about as complicated to understand as the terminal apt-get.. I guess this Slashdot thing will never become a mainstream player either.

Re:Missing the Target

[stewbacca]

As long as this distro has an icon driven way to install Flash, then it is an issue related to the author. If that is the case, then the author is wrong. BUT...to the eyes of the masses, Linux is just like this guy describes: typing in random stuff in a command line (even if it isn't true). In otherwords, because of articles like this one, Linux is getting a raw deal. The author is making Linux less accessible to people who casually gloss over the review.

Yes, I used html tags...poorly, even. And yes you are right, this slashdot thing will never become mainstream. That's the problem with 99% of slashdot stories and discussion threads. Most users on here are nerd-egocentric and think normal people understand what goes on over here, when the actually don't.

Re:Missing the Target

[dbcad7]

I agree with you that authors should demonstrate more simplistic ways of doing things in their articles. For example, you don't see articles where a windows user opens up a command prompt to copy a file, even though you could do it that way.. I suppose when an author uses apt-get in a terminal as opposed to the simpler to understand Synaptic he is bragging about his knowledge of the command line.. which in not helpful to potential users (although may benefit new users)

If you are a particularly fast typist, and have good knowledge of the command line and file names, apt-get can be a little quicker, as there is loading the gui program and then searching for the program and finally installing.. but we are not talking a huge amount of time.. and in truth you may find alternative in your search that you didn't know about.

I mention Synaptic, which is in Debian based distros like Ubuntu. There are of course other similar gui software "package managers" for other distros and for the most part I think that reviewers do test them out.. and they should, because it is a good indicator of how good the distro is. If things like Flash are not readily available in the package manager, then the distro community is not too great.. and you should look elsewhere. I personly think the Debian based distros are the way to go mostly because of apt-get and Synaptic.. your millage may vary.

The gOS has something to say to you...

[iamwahoo2]

And apparently that is "f you".

Look at the first screenshot, the "f" icon on the bottom menu bar is followed by the word "you". I guess the "you" is half of the youtube icon. They need to reorder that menubar.

Re:The gOS has something to say to you...

[bcrowell]

And apparently that is "f you". Look at the first screenshot, the "f" icon on the bottom menu bar is followed by the word "you". I guess the "you" is half of the youtube icon. They need to reorder that menubar.
Hee hee. That row of icons (called the "shelf" in the docs) scrolls back and forth dynamically when you put the mouse over one end of it or the other. You would only get the "f you" effect for the particular random position it happened to be in when I took the screenshot.

Not just mail order OR walmart

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883118003
newegg carries them

Big difference

[Fri13]

There is big difference with sudo and root accounts. Every Ubuntu user gets ROOT rights, even they dont know what is difference between super account (root) and normal account. Ubuntu just gives permits to user rule everything on machine what they dont even know, just some forum is tellin to do sudo . There is big difference is application asking "Give root password" and "Give your password". yes, it is easier to try to crack root account because we always know there is "root" account and sudo littlebit helps this by using username account what is difference. But how many use username other as own name? I might have Fri13_nextdoor and password as TryTOD0Th1S0N3_t0_M3 and it cant be hacked unless there is security flaw. But user is always that weakest chain in security and giving normal user two password, one for own purpose and one for admin purpose, there is big difference wich one is needed when login or opening screen lock and when needed to open Mandriva Control Center or SUSE Yast. And most users have same password on every webpage or same username. And forums even keeps track of IP. So it is easier to try first hack PHPBB to get passwords and then get IP and use just username and password to login that machine and crack it to own purpose. It is better security to have root account and then ask for it over 14 letter password so most users normal "dad" passwords cannot be accepted for admin but for normal account yes for usability. But better reason is to have just 14 letter password for normal account too.

Re:Big difference

[Deltaspectre]

Assuming these machines aren't hardened you mean? (I don't see any reason a normal user would have sshd on for example)

Re:Big difference

[azrider]

Every Ubuntu user gets ROOT rights, even they dont know what is difference between super account (root) and normal account. Ubuntu just gives permits to user rule everything on machine what they dont even know, just some forum is tellin to do sudo .

Unless Ubuntu (and variants) have a) changed the installation since I last used it (admittedly this was 2+ years ago) and b) changed the operation of sudo, this is not true. On Ubuntu, the first user (ie: the user name and password) is given an entry in the sudoers file, allowing them to use sudo to set themselves with root permissions for a limited time. Once there is an entry (or entries) in the sudoers file, the user uses their own password when asked. The primary purpose of the sudo program is to allow root permissions to another user or group without giving them the root password. A secondary purpose is to log who did what as root in case of a system problem caused by an errant user. Might I suggest 'man sudo' for more information?

Re:Big difference

[Fri13]

"Once there is an entry (or entries) in the sudoers file, the user uses their own password when asked. The primary purpose of the sudo program is to allow root permissions to another user or group without giving them the root password. A secondary purpose is to log who did what as root in case of a system problem caused by an errant user."

Yes, that is correct but because there is no root password, there is no way to hide it. Users use own and same password almoust everywhere. If root password would be forced to be over 14 letter and have a-z A-Z !-= and 0-9 numbers in it, it would be much more secure than sudo.

I know that only first user gets sudo but how many users still have more than ONE account on their PC? I havent seen any of new ubuntu users to have more than one and if there is more, they go for "normal users" who just like to surf on web. And then these new first time users have root access even they dont know what difference is between root and normal account because they come from windows OS.

It would be very stupid to have all sudo rigts on every user who gets added to system. But there is so much problems (other than just security) with non-root distribution.

very good, for a non-gaming machine??

[Joe The Dragon]

With a 1.5GHz, VIA -D Processor, 512MB DDR2 533MHz, SDRAM, 80GB Hard Disk Drive, DVD-ROM/CD-RW Optical Drive, and VIA UniChrome Pro IGP Graphics?

alot of non gameing uses may want a DVDRW and they cost about $10 more then a DVD-ROM/CD-RW.

And you can buy 1GB of low end DDR2 for about $30 after rebate higher end DDR2 800 2x1gb dual channel kits with times like 4-4-4-15-1T and heat spreaders are only about $50 after rebate.

A 80GB HD is ok but a lot of non games may need more space.

VIA UniChrome Pro IGP Graphics is low end video chip and intel gma video is better and it can run aero and most new systems with on board video have DVI ports now days as well.

Only 10/100 Ethernet Port most new MB have moved to a 10/100/1000 port.

The Real Reason They Sold Out

[phobos13013]

I wanted to post this on this story, but i got there too late... This article at LinuxDevices alludes that the gOS PCs are really intended to act as a development system for a range of future Linux products using the Ubuntu/Enlightment platform. If you cant get your hands on one of these now, don't worry, you will start seeing these soon a lot more commonly. I bet by the end of 2008, you will see a gOS port for say the eeePC (and questions of whether Xandros is breaking the GPL can be tossed out with the bathwater while keeping the baby!)

Fishy facts

[W2k]

The following line from the review strikes me as fishy:

OpenOffice.org Writer starts in 10 seconds, which is actually slightly faster than on my dual core 2.2 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+!

He doesn't mention what OS the Athlon64 box runs, but my ancient AMD Athlon 1 GHz with 1 GB of RAM running Vista Business starts OpenOffice Writer in 12 seconds. This is with multiple open Firefox windows, Winamp, IRC client, Thunderbird and phpEd running at the same time and all the Vista graphics effects turned on.

My slightly more modern 2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 with 2 GB RAM (also running Vista Biz) starts OpenOffice Writer in about two seconds. In both cases, I measured the time from when the start menu item is clicked to when I can begin typing text into the document. Neither computer runs the "OpenOffice starter" tray junk that is supposed to speed up starting OOo.

In other words, while starting OOo Writer in 10 seconds is perhaps impressive for a five year old computer running Vista, a brand new PC running Linux should do it much faster. And the author's Athlon64 box is just plain misconfigured, or filled with crap, or perhaps a horribly old Java VM...

Re:Fishy facts

[Anonymous Coward]

his computer is probably full of spyware but i digress. the g0S machines use via processors which were primarily meant to be power efficient not fast... so 10 seconds seems to make sense.

Re:Fishy facts

[bcrowell]

He doesn't mention what OS the Athlon64 box runs,
Hi, I'm the author of the article. The x64 box is running Ubuntu Gutsy. The 12 second start time is the for the first time I run OOo. The second time, it's cached, so it only takes a couple of seconds to load. In the article, I was comparing both machines under the same conditions: the first time OOo was loaded.

Re:Fishy facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a comparison.
AMD Sempron 2800+ 1.6Ghz 256KB cache
2 sticks of 512MB RAM for total of 1GB of RAM
Debian Etch Operating System running KDE 3.5.5 with vanilla Firefox from mozilla.org running with two tabs open and one instance of Konqueror open to a local directory.

Using the Run Command feature of KDE, I typed in oowriter and then hit enter. It took nine seconds for OOWriter to load.

Sidenote: I have an Everex laptop I picked up this past summer. 1.5Ghz Via C7M with 1.5GB of RAM. I have been running Debian Etch on it since the day after I got it. I compiled my own kernel for it in order to get the sound working (2.6.21.1). Other than that, it is running Etch stable with a KDE 3.5.5 DE. I love my little machine. My only issue was being forced to run it in VESA mode. Via had not released Linux drivers for the graphics chip until a few months ago. For the last month, I have been using those drivers and everything seems to be okay.

Okay, I booted the laptop and am going to run the same test. I am also running powernowd to throttle my cpu speed, so we will see if that affects anything. This is currently running on battery power also.

On the laptop, it took twenty-five seconds to launch oowriter from the run command dialog box. When I ran the command again it only took ten seconds. There are obvious reasons for the speed up.

And Newegg

[Silkejr]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883118003

Oh wow, was this intentional?

[Erris]

Those other reviews are much nicer than this one. An article that does not work well with Konqueror is always a bad sign (Use Bluefish).

Another bad sign I noticed right away was that the dock's icons have been rearranged so that YouTube's icon and it's neighbor's spell out "F You", compared to normal. It's hard to say if this was intentional or not, because this one has that too. What an odd choice of screenshots to have as the one and only.

Re:Oh wow, was this intentional?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it seems your entire basis for labelling this as a 'bad review' is that his webpage doesn't render properly in your browser, and his desktop icons are in the wrong order?

Are you going to comment on anything relevant? Maybe address some of the issues he had? He's an Ubuntu user, so you can't call him a Microsoft shill this time, so I guess this about the point that you start to get uncomfortable. You might actually have to resort to such dirty tactics as 'debating the point' and 'normal discussion'.

Re:Oh wow, was this intentional?

[bcrowell]

An article that does not work well with Konqueror is always a bad sign
Hi, I'm the author of the review. Can you tell me what doesn't work for you in Konqueror? I have it open in Konqueror right now, and it looks fine on my machine.

Re:Oh wow, was this intentional?

[mattcasters]

You are right, it looks the same on a recent Konqueror and FF.
However, I bet the GP was misled by the fact that the layout looks absolutely horrible: an almost unreadable piece of text slammed to the left of the browser window, using only a fraction of the screen width.

You probably made a good choice installing vanilla Ubuntu on the thing. Look at the memory usage comparison over here.
I found that very interesting. Even though there are very lightweight WMs out there, after you load them with apps, you get to see a different picture.

Matt

Re:Oh wow, was this intentional?

[Erris]

Can you tell me what doesn't work for you in Konqueror?

Sure I can and I hope that it helps. The text displays at the width of the image without a left margin and contains a number of characters that did not display for me. The first sentence reads, "It was time to buy my daughter a cheap Linux system to be used for schoolwork and playing flash games well," but the mdash printed as an annoying symbol instead of a dash. Looking again, I see that you have used a stylesheet so this should not be hard to clean up. Thanks for writing and fixing the review.

Now, would you answer my question? Did you really mean to tell the whole world, "F You"?

Re:Oh wow, was this intentional?

[bcrowell]

but the mdash printed as an annoying symbol instead of a dash.
I can't reproduce your problem in konqueror on my machine.

Now, would you answer my question? Did you really mean to tell the whole world, "F You"?
The reason I didn't answer the question was that the way you asked it was offensive. I did answer it elsewhere.

Re:Oh wow, was this intentional?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason I didn't answer the question was that the way you asked it was offensive.

This is twitter you're talking to. He can't help himself.

Review is rough around the edges.

[Erris]

Others have done a better job.

Why change desktop environments?

[mgkimsal2]

I couldn't get the wifi working by clicking around in Exalt's GUI; it recognized our home network, but wouldn't connect to it via DHCP. I decided that since my previous successful experience had been with Gnome, I would install Gnome and see if I could get the card working with Gnome Network Manager.

Then later

To be fair, I ended up finding out that there had been a regression in wifi support for RT2500 in recent versions of Ubuntu, so it wasn't exactly smooth sailing on the new system.

Why do people insist on thinking that changing the desktop environment will change anything about the experience. I've run in to endless wifi problems with my old ubuntus, and it's nothing to do with the desktop environment. Yet, I would still sometimes get people writing back saying "kubuntu sucks, go install ubuntu, everything just works!".

Linux is basically Linux, and if hardware doesn't work under KDE it's not going to work under GNOME, or IceWM or anything else. Why do people insist on this sort of thinking? Can someone point me to a situation where *hardware* recognition or functionality didn't work under Gnome but worked under KDE (or the reverse, or anything similar)? Especially something like a wifi card?

Re:Why change desktop environments?

[Billly Gates]

Sound works on my laptop with gnome but not with KDE. Some of the tools used to configure the devices are different.

Re:Why change desktop environments?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. I have a GeForce 7300GT that Kubuntu 7.10 picks right up, runs 1440x900 straight off. Ubuntu 7.10 runs in compatibility mode.

Re:Why change desktop environments?

[Yaleman]

Linux IS basically linux, except when the forks of Ubuntu seem to offer differing hardware support options because of kernel version/configuration/etc and the network config tool in the WM's have hissy fits over x piece of hardware vs y piece.

Re:Why change desktop environments?

[hoppo]

Linux is basically Linux, and if hardware doesn't work under KDE it's not going to work under GNOME, or IceWM or anything else. Why do people insist on this sort of thinking?

Because people have been trained to think that the GUI environment is the OS. We have Microsoft and Apple to thank for that.

Re:Why change desktop environments?

[Creamsickle]

You're missing the point.

It's a cost vs. benefit situation. A user (such as the author of this article) of a new desktop environment may need to mess around some length of time just to figure out how to use the tools to properly adjust wifi. The user doesn't know if it's a hardware issue or a configuration issue. He can decide to spend hours learning a tool he is unfamiliar with (and has other issues with besides), when it might not even solve the problem. Or, he can install an environment he knows well, and with a few simple tests can tell if the problem is more basic.

Not hardware, software

[Bombula]

average users require fewer resources than even today's cheapest PCs have

You're much more right than you probably realize. As one of Slashdot's older readers, I remember quite clearly when it was possible to be productive - browse the web, email, office applications - with a machine with a 50 MB hardrive, 8 MB of RAM and a 150Mhz CPU. Shouldn't it be painfully obvious that even the cheapest machine today, being orders of magnitude more powerful than the machines of yesteryear, should be more than capable of handling the same basic functions? And yet your statement does seem fresh and somewhat profound. Why should that be?

Pardon my tinfoil hat, but it seems that the point we've really reached isn't one where any PC is powerful enough to run the basic productivity applications - they all are, and have been for 10 years - but rather one where all PCs, even the cheapest ones, are too powerful to be deliberately stymied by Windows and other OSs. It seems to me to be a software issue, not a hardware issue.

Re:Not hardware, software

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry ... did you say you're one of the older Slashdot readers? I think you're underestimating the age of the average Slashdot reader. Most of the real youngsters hang out over at dig. Heck, *I* don't even consider myself one of the older Slashdot readers, and I started out on the Internet with Windows 3.1 running on a 20MHz 386, with a 40MB hard disk drive (or should I say fixed disk) and 4MB of RAM. It was certainly possible to browse the web, use email, and run office applications with that hardware back then. And I'm sure there are others who have me beat ... those who were buried in academic environments during the 80s, for example.

Re:Not hardware, software

[jedidiah]

8M was NEVER enough for Windows.

If you ran 16 bit windows on so little ram it ran like a pig. It would
be swapping immediately and your entire system basically ran at the
speed of your hard drive.

16M was the sweet spot for Windows 3.1. 32M was even nicer.

The 68k machines could all run well under a small amount of ram. Windows was too much of a pig.

Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like this box doesn't come with a wireless network receiver.

As I recall, there aren't any wireless receivers that reliably support Linux. Has that changed? If I could get a wireless receiver for this thing, I would buy one for my mom.

Re:Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

As I recall, there aren't any wireless receivers that reliably support Linux. Has that changed? Yeah, this has changed way for the better in the last few years. My Intel wireless works out of the box on most Linux distros, including Ubuntu (hell, even getting it to work with Solaris was a breeze).

Other cards are supported too, Google is your friend.

Re:Wireless

[nbarriga]

My Intel Pro Wireless 3945 works fine on Linux.

Re:Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

My laptop has a WPC54G card that works perfectly under Debian and Slackware.

Re:Wireless

[sqrt(2)]

Broadcom doesn't work under Linux without using ndiswrapper (that allows the loading of Windows drivers), and then you can't use WEP. This is a very common wireless chipset found in a majority of laptops. So you'd be correct in saying that the majority are unsupported and unreliable.

Re:Wireless

[gudnbluts]

Your comment's out of date. Broadcoms with ndiswrapper supported WEP just fine. With the latest version of Ubuntu, Broadcoms work without ndiswrapper. Can't speak for other distributions.

Re:Wireless

[sqrt(2)]

Really? I did an Ubuntu 7.10 install just a few days ago on a laptop with broadcom, the restricted driver manager needed a file and that made it work, but I never tested WEP. I assumed that download was just an automated install for ndiswrapper and the driver. Either way though it wasn't working after first boot or after downloading all the updates. I have a similar notebook with broadcom, I plan on seeing for myself now just what is going on. I'm also interested to see if performance is similar to XP, I remember back with ndiswrapper that the signal would be fine when only a few meters from the router but dropped off very sharply after I left the room. Thank you for correcting me.

Of course it's rough, they say it's alpha

[dreemernj]

The gOS Website described gOS this way:

We're still in alpha stage...

At our current state, we are just encouraging interested developers to download, play with, and help improve the gOS. For our general audience, we encourage trying a gOS product that gOS has already been qualified on.

They just recently changed it (since it still said the OS was in alpha stage after Walmart sold out of them).

Winmodem => no dialup!

[DrJimbo]

I have a computer illiterate friend who has an el-cheapo HP machine that is a few years old. She runs Windows and constantly gets infected with viruses. She periodically takes it to a computer shop to get Windows reinstalled which costs about $40.

I've run Linux on her machine via LiveCDs but I've had no joy with her winmodem and she is strictly dialup. An external modem from the local (very small town) computer shop is about $90. The Walmart specs for their $200 Linux PC say it has a modem. I figured this meant they got the modem working with Linux so I suggested she purchase one of these from Walmart. Even with the yearly Windows re-install tax, her Windows install keeps breaking.

The review points out that the $200 Walmart PC also has a winmodem which is also useless under Linux. So I called my friend and told her not to buy it.

Ubuntu rough around the edges

[transporter_ii]

I have been waiting many years for Linux to get to a point where I could dump Windows. Well, I installed Ubuntu just a couple of weeks ago and was extremely impressed. Over the years, I have gone from somewhat of a power user to doing little more than surfing the web and doing e-mail, so it should be perfect for me, right? Over this weekend, I really got to start using the Ubuntu system. The very fist issue I ran into was the Evolution address book wouldn't display contacts you added...if you could get them to even add. I researched the problem and found people describing the exact same problem, in forums dated 2005. The next thing I wanted to do is search and replace some hard returns in OpenOffice's word processor. You can do it to some degree, but you have to search the web for an explanation on how to do it. In the end, it wouldn't work properly, and I had to transfer the file to my Windows system and do it on Word, which just has a menu option to search for special characters (really cool that Ubuntu saw my Window's share and I could just transfer the files over the network). Also, someone said that you could add Flash just by going to a web site that required it and clicking on "add plugin." Well, I tried that, and I had to manually install it, myself...it wasn't hard, but it took me about 15 - 30 minutes of reading some "how to" forums before I got it installed.

All in all, it is hard to complain about something that is free, and I totally plan on continuing my move away from Windows. But I think anyone would be pretty darn hard pressed not to say that Ubuntu doesn't have some rough edges.

One really nice advantage I see, too, is that it sure if nice not to have my hard drive constantly thrashing from all of virus scanners, spyware scanners, etc., running in the background!

Transporter_ii

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[Stormx2]

Also, someone said that you could add Flash just by going to a web site that required it and clicking on "add plugin." Well, I tried that, and I had to manually install it, myself...it wasn't hard, but it took me about 15 - 30 minutes of reading some "how to" forums before I got it installed.

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Or use synaptic to locate and install it, search for "flash".

Also, I found windows to have these rough edges when I did my first install in a few years. I actually have to open a web browser to install software? Madness.

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[turing_m]

Your first two problems are a result of diving in head first. If you had first made a list of what applications you use, and then found an open source program (in the repos, but virtually everything good is in the repos) that does the same thing and is installable in windows, you wouldn't have been beaten over the knuckles as hard your first time around. i.e., you should have installed openoffice in windows and evolution (or thunderbird) in windows first.

As far as flash, someone else here said synaptic. That should be your first port of call whenever you want to install something new. Type in the application type (e.g. email), and optionally google the names of things that come up in order to research. If you just want to suck it and see, the applications with the ubuntu symbol next to them tend to be more polished.

That you made it this far and still use it is a tribute to Ubuntu's ease of use and default app selection. It tends to be a recipe for frustration and failure to switch operating systems before you are comfortable with the FOSS alternatives to your mission critical applications.

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[Blakey Rat]

You do realize you're replying to a joke, right? WTF!

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[bagoas]

Hate to beat a dead horse (Windows), or a promising pony (Ubuntu), but the solution to your problems is to install and enjoy MacOS - a quality assemblage of software, created by professional Linux fans (ie they get paid to fix bugs), and it has two of the nicest text/code editors ever seen:

TextWrangler and Coda (from panic sw)

TextWrangler is incredibly powerful, and free. Coda is incredibly gorgeous and useful (integrated file transfer/sync, terminal, pdf/reference book viewing).

I cannot believe that between Windows and Linux you had to boot up the Word empire to remove hard wraps. Them's hard knocks. Anyone experiencing similar frustration, please give Apple a try, I don't think you'd be disappointed after an initial acclimatization period, period.

For power users/linux users, I highly recommend checking out osx.hyperjeff.net for all your Mac-specific application/sourcecode needs.

Be well,

BDB

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[bigstrat2003]

Personal opinions about Mac OS aside, there's a huge problem with your plan: you need to buy a Mac, and last I checked, the hardware was stupidly underpowered (mini), badly designed (G5 iMac), or expensive, albeit awesome (PowerMac). Until such day as that is no longer the case, I can't recommend Apple hardware to anyone.

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[sheepweevil]

For previous versions of Ubuntu, I had problems getting the Java Firefox Plugin and Flash to work, even after wading through a long and complicated how-to. But with Gutsy Gibbon, I simply used Add/Remove Programs and Synaptic Package Manager to install them with only a couple of clicks, and they have worked perfectly. It seems like Ubuntu is doing well to solve some of these problems.

As for OpenOffice and Evolution, that isn't Ubuntu's fault. You could use Thunderbird for email, and perhaps try KOffice instead of OpenOffice.

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[thegnu]

Ubuntu does have some rough edges, I admit. And they're certainly different than the rough edges found in Windows. :-)

Seriously, though, you should submit that as a bug report to openoffice, because I'm too lazy to do it myself, and it bugs the shit out of me. Could you also please report the SHIFT+BACKSPACE kicks you out of the cell you're in bug in Calc? Thanks. Maybe that wasn't so serious after all.

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[jedidiah]

When it came time to use flash in Gutsy a little utility popped
up within Firefox which directed me to choose either flash or
gnash at which point it did the plugin download and install in
the same fashion as Windows.

Dunno what all the fuss is about really...

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[jedidiah]

The mini isn't stupidly underpowered.

It's just smaller than it needs to be for it's target demographic
while being 2-4 times more expensive than the lowend WinPC equivalent.

It's makes a great little HTPC. Rediculously overpriced otherwise.

It's like the old $400 pricetag for the x86 version of OpenStep is still in effect...

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[qinjuehang]

I am posting this on Ubuntu, and I agree with the rough edges. After all, I should say all your hardware are manufactured under Windows standards, and are not designed for Linux, so hardware-related bugs and errors always appear, unless the company actually releases the source code of the drivers. (I think Intel does). But I still prefer Linux over Windows, except when gaming. The main reason is because of my registry keys. I'm the sort who likes to try out programs and uninstall them hours or even minutes later, and because of that, Windows is not really for me. Every program leaves behind a small fragment of its registries when uninstalled...and now my registry keys take longer than anything to parse. Regedit is lagging...

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[pugugly]

I'm not sure I think Ubuntu is an improvement on that score. I have had so many times I wanted to install one program, and found it came with a 30 program Suite to clutter up my menus with.

Games are the worst offenders - I want one good logic game, I don't need a copy of hangman and 20 other 'educational' games with it, but they are not the only offender. It wouldn't be so bad if it was in add/remove programs with something saying "This game is a part of the educational games suite, This list of programs will also be installed . . .". I'm sure if I was smart enough with apt-get,I could get the individual programs uninstalled, but it's a pain.

That may be the single thing I still find most annoying about Ubuntu -

Pug

Re:Ubuntu rough around the edges

[qinjuehang]

Yes I had this problem when I started ubuntu. But normally, individual packages can be easily installed with synaptic. Because in the Add/Remove programs menu, the programs are mainly "Meta packages", in synaptic they will be empty packages with all the other small programs of the suite as "dependencies". So you can just install one of the "dependencies" in synaptic, without install the whole packages. Of course that was off topic. Rough edges, to me, mean more than this. "Rough edges" are things such as problems with hibernation, problems with ATI graphics cards...this is no a problem with Linux, or Ubuntu normally. But look at it this way...hardware is designed to Microsoft's standards, not Ubuntu or Linux's standards

Re:Winmodem = no dialup!

[Anonymous Coward]

I sit here now, typing this on a dial up connection using a winmodem. Do your research. There are some chipsets that are more difficult than others to get running. My Conexant HCF required me to part with $20 to Linuxant, but is still well worth the cost.

awesome web design

[Sparr0]

Hey kdawson, wake up and smell the 90s. Some of us have monitors more than 640 pixels wide, so your 500 pixel fixed width is just a TAD hard to read when it is 5" wide on the left edge of a 30" monitor. Thank god for firebug, I just had to delete the width style on your container div.

Re:awesome web design

[Anonymous Coward]

Kdawson didn't write that.

And Homer said...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Does anyone care what this guy thinks?"

And the croud replied to him with great speed:

"No!"

For fucks sake..

[msimm]

could we stop saying asinine things like "Linux isn't ready for..." the variant here was gOS and then Ubuntu. Linux is (still) the kernel.

Summary of the review

[pilotlicense]

The review can be summed up, "You get what you pay for."

Portal and Bioshock

[DeadDecoy]

Just to comment, portal will probably run on your system if you have a decent budget card. Valve has been fairly lenient on what your computer specs should be. Now, bioshock on the other hand, I'd recommend buying a 360 not because the graphics are laggy (though they are), but because the pc version is just so damned buggy. My comp does a hard reboot every ~20 min playing that game :(. I don't have a beasty of a computer, but I expect some stability... Buy the Orange Box, HL2, Portal, and TF2 are all fun.

Re:Portal and Bioshock

[meringuoid]

Just to comment, portal will probably run on your system if you have a decent budget card.

GeForce 7600GS, about as good as AGP cards get I think. Got it fairly cheap a while back, just after I bought my widescreen monitor and realised that while it's fair enough on a CRT, 800x600 looks really, really poor when your native resolution is 1440x900 :-)

Re:Portal and Bioshock

[DeadDecoy]

Bah! you and your shiny monitors :P. I grew up during the Doom/C&C/Monkey Island games, so just about everything looks good enough. Given that, I probably wouldn't notice that extra pore on my character's face no matter how hard I try.

Horrible Review

[Anonymous Coward]

What sucks is the author of this review jumping right into an area of this OS that is problematic for most Linux distros, namely the addition of a wireless card specifically and a point when the review becomes largely over. As a review the process had barely begun when the author attempts to switch OS to Ubuntu due to problems installing his wireless card.

As a review, this in a word is a joke.

Inconsistancies

[dbcad7]

I am interested in how you got apt-get to work and install flash, but yet the network wasn't connected yet... did it come on a CD repository or something ?

You knew that the login manager was different, why didn't you just install GDM instead of a complete Ubuntu replacement ? this would have in essence given you the ability to switch back and forth (as you obviously know) and perhaps work out the kinks in gOS.. although maybe everything worked out for the best as it was..., it wasn't too helpful for gOS users who probably don't have an Ubuntu CD handy like you apparently did.

Was Synaptic included in the original install ?

Re:Inconsistancies

[bcrowell]

I am interested in how you got apt-get to work and install flash, but yet the network wasn't connected yet... did it come on a CD repository or something ?
I had an ethernet connection in the room where I was setting the machine up. I just don't have an ethernet connection in the machine's final location.

You knew that the login manager was different, why didn't you just install GDM instead of a complete Ubuntu replacement ?
I didn't know how to replace their login manager with gdm.

I picked up one of these... (just the motherboard)

[(H)elix1]

I *thought* I was getting a hell of a deal on a mini-itx form factor mainboard/cpu... that is what I get for pulling the trigger on a 'hot deal' and not doing my homework. (as well as browsing on a cell phone in text only mode).

Anyhow - my pics and notes about the development board and CD...

http://heelix.multiply.com/journal/item/53/Ordered_a_walmart_special..._gOS_dev_board

Seems like the C7 is an i586 architecture, rather than i686. The Ubuntu distribution (including gOS, which is based on Ubuntu) worked just fine. Other distributions would barf on the i686 bits - including Centos (4 & 5), Gentoo, and a couple others. Goofy. I did not expect to have to work hard on hardware that 'shipped' with Linux.

Re:512M of ram? Do you use it?

[gosand]

It is cheap to add another 1GB of ram.

My machine has 768 MB RAM. It's an older machine (Duron 1.3, PC-133 memory), but it runs Kubuntu Feisty just great. I have a dual-monitor setup with a Geforce4 MX-440 video card. I now have Firefox open with 5+ tabs on it, Swiftweasel, 5 tabbed Konsoles, Gaim, Amarok, VMware console... and I have 452 MB free. What the heck do you use that much memory for? I know people now have 2 or 4 gig... but what the heck for? I can't figure out what is using it. ONCE I was able to use up my memory, by loading up about 20 very hi-res images in Firefox tabs. But other than that, I rarely use half of my memory. And I often run GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Kpdf, Ktorrent, K3b. I don't have memory issues. Is this just a bragging rights thing?

so can I install window 2000 on this?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least I can use it for download :)

Does it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it GPL-spirit-compatible this time?..

Why E?!

[kaka.mala.vachva]

Personally, I thought it was a bit daft to include enlightenment as the default window manager. Sure, it looks pretty - but last time I used it, I had to compile links/images before I could add them to engage! And its been in development far too long. Why couldn't they have just stuck with gnome/kde? Both are easier to use - if not as pretty. And if they intended to sell this to regular users (and tech-savvy people don't usually shop at Walmart for computer systems) then it would have made more sense to have a window manager that is *simple* to use. Gnome is straight forward to use - my wife has no problems with it. And even though I don't personally use kde, its much better as well than using what appears to be e17 on a system aimed at regular, non-technical users!

Re:512M of ram? Do you use it?

[Monsuco]

Mine has a mere 512, I might up it to 1 GB, but I will wait at least till I get a new NIC. My old one broke. I can run Kubuntu with Beryl (using an embeded intel graphics card) and play games just fine.

FYI: Another Review

[mpapet]

I built the packages from the thinkgos repo's and found the following on a Fiesty install.

For those that don't follow enlightenment, it's e17. All the gee-whiz graphics without the overhead. Errr, except:

1. The thinkgos.com package builds are buggy as hell. These don't even qualify as Ubuntu quality. I certainly get better builds out of Debian unstable.
2. udev wierdness. It's an odd situation where udev does the right thing according to dmesg, but the desktop environment (DE) doesn't work right in common situations.
3. No system tray or task bar. Stalonetray works far better than trayer, but you still have to work at it a bit and it's a nasty hack that hangs off the end of the bottom panel no matter what. The head-honcho at e17 does not feel whatever standard exists for system trays is sufficient.
3. I can't tell if the desktop environment is supposed to have sound effects, but I got pulseaudio working (finally) and it plays stuff, just no desktop environment sounds.
4. No transparency. For whatever reason, there's no Xorg transparency support. Someone please point out how to do it. I'd love to be wrong.

This sounds like the kind of thing...

[Samarian Hillbilly]

that give linux a bad name. Even if there were a "perfect" distro for naive users. A normal user (unaware that there are many "distros" of linux), would see this as the "Linux" he'd been reading about and reject it out-of-hand. Perhaps another reason why linux is so slow taking desktop market-share.

Most publicized PC ever

[SlappyBastard]

OK, it has now officially been mentioned every other day for twenty weeks. We get it. There's a $200 Linux PC for sale at Wally.

Thanks for the review

[symbolset]

It was interesting. The wattages you showed were informative. I bought one of these boxes too, from ZaReason. I'm typing this on it.

I didn't have the trouble you had finding the log out button. I was also disappointed to have to install flash myself, and I didn't get it done as easily as you did, but it didn't take me too long. Now that your review is up, other users should have little trouble. Java was a little tricky. Citrix plugin for firefox took half an hour to get set up right. I didn't have the network trouble you did because my house is already wired for Ethernet so it was plug and go for me. I was on the internet a few minutes after the box was open.

The primary purpose for this machine is to be the main PC for my son. He's four. He loves it. It plays his favorite flash and Java based games. In My Applications->System Tools->Add/Remove I installed the game Childsplay, which is educational and fun for him to play. There are thousands of programs in there to install and they're all free. He didn't need any instruction to get started.

The monitor I'm using is widescreen 1680x1050. When you set widescreen, you have to check the box that looks greyed for widescreen, and I had to tell it the monitor was a similar one to the one I have because it's a new brand and the database doesn't include my monitor. That was about it. Videos and DVDs play just fine and look lovely. HD not so much... It was a slideshow with the WMV I downloaded. I'll have to see if it's acceptable with XviD+MP3 AVI files before I give up on that.

I am quite happy with gOS. I think he'll stay with it for a while. That's odd for me because I preach nevernevernever use an OEM OS install. I'm really looking forward to using Gutsy since it works so well. The machine is fine for most things, and works for its purpose very well. Not a gaming machine, but this is nice and moving to lower wattage PCs will be better in the long run. I'll build the machine up to 2GB RAM and 500GB SATA RAID just because that's the kind of geek I am but really for normal PC use the memory and drive it comes with works great. I wish they offered a more deluxe box in a gOS version. I noticed the Google branding all over as you did. If it were any other company I would care, but I actually was going to have to install all that stuff anyway so for me it's nice to find it there. I smiled a little bit at the "Google OS" idea. If this is the Google OS, I'll take it.

Earlier today I had to check an Excel spreadsheet for work. It opened quickly in OO.o Calc, and everything was where it should be. I've worked with Word documents too, and nothing bad happened.

Basically, for $200 I was expecting junk. That's not what I got. I'll be buying more of these in the future. One to replace our aging media server, probably one to replace my web server. Very nice.

Is anyone really buying these machines?

[director_mr]

I see them reviewed a lot, but I would be interested to know if people really buy them. Or if they prefer to have windows installed and pay another 100 dollars. Or if they prefer a more expensive and polished system. My gut is telling me the 200 dollar computer will be a flop and we will see another slashdot thread moaning about how Walmart is evil and didn't support the computer enough even though seemingly every person willing to buy this computer seemingly refuses to go to Walmart for one reason or another. A hint: if the only people willing to buy the PC can't be bothered to go to Walmart and buy this computer, its not going to succeed. In any case, if you are a geek, and want a linux computer, you can get someone's old computer and put linux on it almost for free. My box cost me $50, and it is happily running squid and dansquardian and doing basic browsing and office tasks just fine.

Oh, by the way, you can get a dell with a gig of Ram for $349, and with a 17 inch monitor for $500 right now. I bet Dell outsells this $200 computer by a huge margin. Why would that be? Could it be no one really wants a $200 Linux computer?

I bought a Walmart Linux PC

[Anonymous Coward]

about 3 years ago, when they first tried to sell them. It came without drivers for either the nic card or the modem. It had a Winmodem (??!!!WTF?), and some Windows source code buried in a directory. Another problem: the "Linare" Linux that was on it did not have cc or gcc, linker or libraries, so even if the source was ok, there was no way to build it. The tech support was ONE GUY (in a foreign country, I think), who kept explaining to me in broken English how to install devices on Windows. He had to "talk to his supervisor" to find out what Linux was. He supposedly emailed me rpm's for the right drivers, but the rpms were broke and unpackable when I rec'v'd them, and at that point, I gave up on it and installed Knoppix. It worked MUCH better, but I never did find the right Linux drivers for the winmodem.
I'll never buy real tech from Walmart again.

Clueless != dumb

[SmallFurryCreature]

It simply means you don't know something about a specific subject. Perhaps I am using the wrong word, but I certainly did NOT mean dumb. I meant to describe a person who doesn't know anything about computers. Just like some people know nothing about cars, construction (I once had to fix a drainage pipe that was at an UPWARDS angle), clothes etc etc.

I am clueless at quit a lot of things, doesn't make me dumb.

And think about it, what are you saying about Joe Consumer?

It's only $200!

[Crasp]

I'm sorry but this review is extremely biased by a (more or less) experienced Ubuntu user. Some criticism is spot on (like the PSU efficiency remark) but some criticism is a bit far fetched. It lacks in documentation, sure but to cover the last 20% it probably requires 80% more time which would make the PC easily $300 instead of $200, not to mention that the writer apparently thinks that all PC's should be capable of understanding any piece of hardware you push into it. This PC just does what it's supposed to do, it runs with the preinstalled hardware and that's it. Want to customise it? Fine, you pay the extra price for it. I think $200 for a complete PC (excluding monitor) is actually pretty cheap. Don't forget that $200 is a price you could easily spend on a half-decent CPU alone and now you get a complete working PC for it. Sure it might lack a bit on this and that's but if you consider that a problem you probably bought the wrong PC.

Could this be the famed "goobuntu?"

[bsod_vista]

I downloaded the livecd and booted it up as a vm. As TFA said there is a heavy google presence on the desktop. Also take into consideration that this is an Ubuntu-based distro...

What is Green?

[bobs666]

The reviewer need to be reminded that a Green PC is not only its power consumption, But the time to dumpster is important as well. A computer that is good for 6 years is twice as green as the normal PC that is only good for 3 years.

As for Installing a new OS, OR distro., You are now entering the realm of the hardware/software expert. Be aware of that the computer you are buying is designed to do and stick to that. Or expect to start solving hardware and software problems.