More Cheap Linux PCs 326
prostoalex writes "The low-cost Linux PC market so far dominated by Lindows got a new entrant. According to News.com, Linare plans to sell a $199 no-monitor model with 1GHz VIA CPU, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD, KDE, OpenOffice. An extra $50 would get the user upgraded to a 2GHz Athlon. Company is located in beautiful Bellevue, WA, which, as News.com noted, is quite close to another Seattle suburb - Redmond, WA."
Will they donate to linux development? (Score:5, Insightful)
in simpler terms (Score:1, Insightful)
Clear enough?
Re:broken website..? (Score:3, Insightful)
Questionable Quality (Score:0, Insightful)
Looks like a good choice for a router (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm currently looking for a cheap computer to use as a router/firewall/internet gateway for my home network. This looks like a good solution; just bang in the spare wireless & ethernet cards sitting in my bits box, bridge them together, and then hook in my USB ADSL modem. Stuff on some iptables rules and some intrusion detection, and I've got just the setup I need. Best bit is, I won't be paying for the two expensive things I don't need: MS Windows and a monitor.
More friendly than what?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I love statements like that, More friendly and reliable than what?? A TRS-80?? Mac?? Silly marketing
Wow... (Score:1, Insightful)
Nice. I'm in.
RAM? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather have a 600 Mhz machine with twice as much RAM so that KDE doesn't run like a slug.
Maybe 128 MB would be excusable if they turn the anti-aliasing and other shiny eye-candy off by default.
Once again (Score:5, Insightful)
The more of these dime companies release crap boxes, the more Linux will be thought of as a crap OS, the kind of thing your redneck friends buy at Wal-Mart because they can't afford a real PC from Dell or Gateway with the "good" OS.
Sounds crappy, but that's where I see this going. Keep it up.
Amazing how much leaving out Windows saves you (Score:3, Insightful)
Decisions, decisions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well worth the $$ (Score:3, Insightful)
Why no monitor? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is no one doing a complete PC, with decent RAM, video and so forth for, say $400-$500 range?
Dont these cheapo Linux PC just cheapen the image of Linux?
Re:RAM? (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually pull a stick of RAM out of one of my own boxes and lend it too them for a week or so. They usually end up buying more RAM.
It's really amazing how much trust people put in companies. It's even more amazing that companies get away with all the crap they pull.
Actually, I wouldn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can build a regular Duron 1.3Ghz box including case, keyboard, mouse, 30GB HD, 128MB RAM, and using onboard video, sound and LAN for about £140 including the 17.5% sales tax.
Generally US retailers bizarrely don't include the tax (even though you're gunna pay it anyway), so deduct 17.5% from my figure, that's £119.15.. which is just over $190.
These guys are in the US, and they're trade.. so they're getting their parts at well below $200, and probably have a margin of 50%, excluding labor, which, admittedly, could be the deal breaker in the bloated US salary market.
Re:Looks like a good choice for a router (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong... I realize a full fledged *nix NAT box would be considerably more flexible, not to mention more fun.
Re:Creation of a blue collar computing segment (Score:5, Insightful)
If the working poor are using the cheap PCs and Linux as opposed to the Wintel machines out there, all that practical experience could conceivably serve a grander purpose: "street smart" computer users who with a little more formal training could be sysadmins and jump into the IT sector with the corresponding higher wages.
Being "less educated" with the greater set of "practical skills" is not necessarily a bad thing. When Microsoft advertises its MCSE program, encouraging people with (and I nearly quote) "no computer experience needed!" to apply, I put people with practical skills above those with a zero pervious experience and a nicely framed certification certificate.
It's a simple case of "book smarts" versus "street smarts." "Book smarts" can get you the honors at graduation; "street smarts" get the job done.
My $b10 for the day.
Re:Creation of a blue collar computing segment (Score:2, Insightful)
The PaperRoute Box (Score:3, Insightful)
as a blue collar... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it's funny, there's such a widely diverse market, and it's happened so quickly. Nearest I can recall is how fast portable "transistor" radios caught on, one year, nada, next year a few, at 50 to 100$, which was serious money then, within a few more years, everyone had one, cheap as all get out. What are they now, a dollar a piece in small quantity wholesale lots? computers now are the same deal, so many out there that work well and only run 50$ used, I think that's where a lot of the sales are going. Or people get them given to them. I have a stack of older pentiums I fool with, I bought a whole pallet of them for really cheap, with a ton of other doo dads thrown in, like another stack of ibm clickers, heh. PCs are cheap now, that's why the flat new sales, there's no absolute "need" for millions of people anymore.
Hmm, I have YET to make a "cluster" hmmmm.....
Re:Looks like a good choice for a router (Score:0, Insightful)
Then you are talking about a fvcking server, and not a fcking router. If you wanted to do more than fvcking route fvcking packets, you should have fvcking said so from the fvcking begining.
Re:Looks like a good choice for a router (Score:2, Insightful)
I would do that any day rather than trust a retailer to assemble a system for me.
Then you could make use of that inventory of spare computer components of varying degrees of use and obsoleteness any sensible geek keeps handy.
Re:Technical != nerdy != academic (Score:3, Insightful)
Most car mechanics I know are nerds in some way. It just is not generally with computers, but they know all kinds of factoids about their love--cars.
Have you ever watched Monster Garage? I think Jesse James is pretty much a nerd, but because he builds custom choppers and uses a welding torch instead of a keyboard, he is not placed in that category. He exhibits similar personality characteristics to the the uber-geeks I know.
It just struck watching the show one weekend. If I had gone to VoTech instead of a high school that was focused on College Prep, I would have become somewhat like him. Working on cars, using my creative abilities to build custom cars or custom fabricate solutions to my customer's problems.
As it is, I build custom software and fabricate software solutions for client's problems.
Re:Creation of a blue collar computing segment (Score:2, Insightful)
The same is the case here. You might hire some of these people to maintain the desktops in your enterprise but you sure as hell won't have one of them being sysadmin on your mission-critical mainframe servers.
But what if it works? (Score:4, Insightful)
But what if, for $200, you get a computer that you can take out of the box, plug in and start surfing the Web within a couple of minutes? In short, what if the computer works as advertised and gets you doing what you want without any fuss?
I'd imagine that if Joe Public wanted a machine that could send email, and if that's what he got for his $200, he'd be happy enough. By and large, the operating system would be transparent and irrelevant to what he was doing.
Linare plagiarized from Suse (Score:2, Insightful)
is a word-for-word ripoff of:
http://www.suse.de/en/partner/become_partner/
Every Sale IS a "Donation" (Score:5, Insightful)
However, don't count out the value of getting more "desktops" out there in the hands of ordinary users! Every system sold (assuning these boxes are reasonably well built, and configured with software that works well together so the whole thing doesn't just backfire) is another new Linux user. Every new Linux user is another step towards the kind of market share that will get the attention of real, honest, money making businesses. And, if you get their attention, they are going to start looking for Linux developers to build things for these boxes.
It might not be money in my pocket now, but it's more likely I'll have a fun job developing real stuff for Linux and OSS in the future...
Re:Will they donate to linux development? (Score:2, Insightful)
It depends what you mean "donate". I work for a company doing Linux work, and we sponsor local events such as InstallFests.
But the most important "sponsorship" I think is that it gives me the skills to start to impart into the community. I'm involved in a significant amount of community efforts in South Australia and I use the knowledge gained at work to also help in the community.
I think we need to consider that simply getting Linux out there is a service in and of itself. The more that Linux is out there, the more likely we'll find the next kernel hacker and so forth and so on.
Linare is quite full of themselves ..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Excerpt:
"Linare is the worldâ(TM)s premier technology system integrator for Linux solutions in the enterprise."
I wish them all the luck in the world though
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
Exactly! (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally could give a shit less about 128 megs of ram here, 500 Mhz here, 5 FPS there. The one thing I care about is getting things done. If a computer is capable of doing such, then it is good. Anything actually capable of getting things done is worth the price in my mind. If that price is $200, then hell yeah!.
Notice that this is coming from a teenager who counts fps and mhz, relevates it to the available RAM, etc. I still could give a shit less, as long as it gets it done in a timely (meaning not taking half your day, not compiling a kernel in 1.4 seconds) manner.
I'm willing to bet an extreme amount of money that these things get the job done, and get it done in a timely fashion. For the average Joe-Sixpack, what more do you need? In all honesty, nothing much.
We finally (yes, at 17 I said finally) live in an age where function is over fashion. This age is maturing into something a little bit more than that, where efficiency is actually a variable in the thinking of the average customer. Computers like this (which I'm willing to bet get things done timely) are actually a wanted commodity now.
I expect this company to flourish, not only because of their mission statement (you get the jist of it after awhile
Think HP, when they were desperately looking for investors. Think IBM, before they got their IPO. Think Sid Meier before CivII; think even of BMW and VW before WWII. These people have the right idea in mind. Make a usable computer available to the public for the same cost as a (gasp!) video game system.
I don't know about most business analysts out there, but this company hit the market where most of the future market comes from, the teens. They relevated the cost of a good working (and unique! Teens love unique) computer for the same cost of a Playstation 2 or an X-Box.
With all do honesty, probabbly around %80 (from personal experience anyway, don't take this data to heart) of all teens recognize the importance of Internet access and a working computer. I'm willing to bet that almost all of these teens would rather take the computer
Meaning what? That this company has finally done something that only Microsoft (with it's multi-billion marketing dept.) has managed to do once in their almost 30 year history of existance. It hit on a rather large demographic, the American teen.
Expect this company to be around for awhile, people, I do
Re:Will they donate to linux development? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is it that so many people release stuff under the GPL and therefore give it away for free, and then want paying for it? If you want paying for your product DON'T GIVE YOU PRODUCT AWAY FOR FREE! You can still give the source code away, but just don't let people give away / sell their own copies of the product.