Wal-Mart's $200 Linux PC Sells Out 619
hankmt writes "About a week ago Wal-Mart began selling a $200 Linux machine running on a 1.5 ghz VIA C7 processor and 512 MB of RAM. While the specs are useless for Vista, it works blazingly fast on Ubuntu with the Enlightenment Window Manager. The machine is now officially sold out of their online warehouses (it may still be available in some stores). And the product sales page at wal-mart.com is full of glowing reviews from new and old Linux users alike."
Useful user reviews - oh wait (Score:5, Informative)
By NWAshopper, AR Read all reviews by this reviewer
Value for price paid: 1 out of 5
Meets Expectations: 1 out of 5
Buyers beware! Don't let the low cost of this computer sway your credit card. This computer doesn't have the power to run Windows XP!!! This is a decent buy for the tech smart who are looking for ITX Hardware on the cheap. DO NOT BUY. You will be very dissapointed!
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5
Great Value for Money, 11/06/2007
By CompuShopr Read all reviews by this reviewer
Value for price paid: 5 out of 5
Meets Expectations: 5 out of 5
This is a Linux machine that's capable of XP or Vista. It runs quick, and upgrades easily. Major con is no monitor. Tried XP and Vista and it runs like a champ. Definitely recommend this product.
Re:Support??? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More /. Cognitive Dissonance (Score:1, Informative)
It was a joke and that is a whooshing sound (Score:1, Informative)
See there is a sort of running joke, referred to as a meme, that is to ask "Yeah, but can it run Linux?" to pretty much any new hardware of system discussion. I could ignore this but I figure there will be others who see it and think that the gp was serious. Still, it I'm embarrassed for you so I'm posting anonymously, so maybe nobody sees this either.
Posting anonymously is sort of like super stealth technology, I can say anything I want and nobody will ever read it.
Re:More /. Cognitive Dissonance (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, though, you don't have to buy a sub-$200 PC from Wal-Mart if you don't want to.
At Pricewatch, there's quite a few bring-your-own-OS deals, including Core 2 Duo or athlon 64 x2 systems for ~$200 including shipping.
Also available from a small retailer... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.zareason.com/shop/product.php?productid=16160&cat=0&page=1 [zareason.com]
So you can buy it there with a clean conscience. heh.
BTW, I have no business relation with the family that runs Zareason, but I did buy about $8,400.00 worth of products from them, and Zareason did a fine job of shipping the products to the public middle school that I ordered on behalf of. More details on that purchase here:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/1446254 [slashdot.org]
Re:Support??? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cool, but how many did the really sell? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:laughable (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't trust the reviews (Score:4, Informative)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=599025 [ubuntuforums.org]
Re:But, (Score:3, Informative)
Wal-Mart is really trying to make Linux sell (Score:5, Informative)
2002 Walmart sells Lindows PCs:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/general-10/wal-mart-ships-linux-pcs-23619/ [linuxquestions.org]
2003 Microtel computers with SUSE Linux:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,111557-page,1/article.html [pcworld.com]
2004 Linspire computers on sale at Wal-Mart for $498.00
http://www.news.com/Wal-Mart-debuts-498-Linux-laptop/2100-1044_3-5498006.html [news.com]
May of 2007, Dell computers on sale at Wal-Mart:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/15701 [networkworld.com]
Wal-Mart is not stupid. They know that as the price of PCs falls, their sales volume rises. They have a vested interested in commoditizing PCs. With Microsoft, Wal-Mart gets a limited mark-up. With Linux PCs made by small vendors, Wal-Mart gets to call the shots. Wal-Mart has dollars signs in their eyes, and those dollars signs are dancing with Tux.
Re:It's been like this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:lol dollars (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oh get real (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I ordered one. (Score:3, Informative)
Retail component prices:
Re:What's that in bogomips (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's the index. But thinks for the link.
Looks like it would be about 3,000 bogomips. Not cutting edge, but not too shabby either.
Re:Also available from a small retailer... (Score:2, Informative)
If you want to roll your own, the motherboard/CPU + gOS bundle is still available from http://www.clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A4842001 [clubit.com] for $60 incl. free ground shipping (and, I guess, whatever tax thing gets applied.. as a Brit that still sometimes confuses)
Stick of RAM, flash drive, pico PSU & power brick - and you'd have quite a nice, and silent box..
Via chipsets (Score:3, Informative)
As to Warcraft III, I couldn't comment. Back when it first came it, I had little luck getting it to work in Cedega and Wine didn't do the copy-protection thing very well. This may be due to lack of nice support between Cedega and the VIA chipsets, though, rather than a lack of power in the chip itself.
Don't expect it to play any newer games, but the simple 3d stuff works just fine.
Via is from Taiwan moron...Taiwan isnt commie (Score:3, Informative)
GDP per capita of $29,600. The only people who claim Taiwan is part of PRC is the PRC
and people who dont know geography
They do have factories in China just like every american manufacturer but the
corporation and the chips are from Taiwan.
Re:lol dollars (Score:3, Informative)
The Star's software was written in Mesa rather than Smalltalk, and it didn't originally ship with Smalltalk (or any other programming language for that matter). Smalltalk was added later as an option, but then so were several other languages, including Lisp.
"Too complex and bug-ridden compared to simpler things like functional programming"
Smalltalk itself was a small VM with about seventy low-level functions -- everything else, including the byte-code compilers were written in that, and source to them was traditionally supplied (at least in early versions), so anybody competent enough to program in Smalltalk could fix any bugs that weren't in the VMs themselves. It's also unfair to say that Smalltalk's version of OO was more complex than functional programming, because the entire system, including the language itself, only had two types of entity: objects and messages.
"The Star was cool though."
Unfortunately, the initial version was also an entirely closed system which had no development tools at all (the supplied applications were supposed to do everything that an office would need). This situation was rectified at a later date, but the fact that these weren't Star-specific (and didn't even need a Star to run on) meant that they ended up being used to write software for other systems rather than the Star itself.
"I never used Lisa, but I was impressed by it. I first saw the Lisa as an intern at JPL. Nice machine and it could also run Unix."
The Lisa system that ran Unix probably wasn't a standard Lisa. Apple supplied a UNIX-based computer with the same hardware that was used a development system for the Lisa itself, which had no "native" development tools of its own. Those who wanted to write software for it required both a standard Lisa to act as a target / test rig, and a development Lisa, which was a pretty expensive setup for software houses, especially when the potential market for their products was very small, so there was very little interest in developing third party software products for it.
Re:Useful user reviews - oh wait (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Its no good for Vista, but... (Score:3, Informative)
One of the biggest complaints about Vista I see is that machines that run XP fine are dog slow with Vista.
Re:What's that in bogomips (Score:0, Informative)