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."
sounds cool (Score:5, Interesting)
broken website..? (Score:0, Interesting)
wont work , support costs to much (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hopefully (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:wont work , support costs to much (Score:2, Interesting)
- 1 GHz VIA Processor with Motherboard (built in everything) - $50 US
- 20 GB JTS (heh... probably not that bad) HDD - $40 US
- Keyboard + Speakers + Mouse - $2
- Case with 100 watt power supply - $15
- 128 MB RAM - $15
(wholesale prices, of course)
Total: $122.
Lots of room for profit.
Re:include the cost of a monitor (Score:3, Interesting)
I recall that Lindows PCs from Walmart had a huge shipping markup (like $100). Looks like the shipping is more reasonably priced at ~$15 now.
Creation of a blue collar computing segment (Score:5, Interesting)
What this means, I think, is that we're starting a new generation on cheap PCs that will be more maintenance heavy than Dells and Apples. This will have the same effect that cars have had over the last forty years: since new cars are so expensive, and the only option for the poor to own one is to get a used one or an extremely cheap one. There's a pool of talent/skill that gets built in the lower classes around practical maintenance.
In other words, the same way that my brother's Lexus is worked on by someone with a high school education who tinkered a lot with cars, the sysadmins of tomorrow will generally come from blue collar backgrounds, while the white collar users will move further out of the ability to generally maintain computers. In a business, the IT department will become less educated overall, while having a much stronger base of practical skills.
I'm already seeing this at my workplace, a manufacturer of household commodities. Lots of the factory workers ask if they can buy/have old PCs that we're getting rid of; several have built their own from old pieces they scrounged. We have a developing pool of computer knowledge that comes from nothing but the tinkering of people who can't afford to do otherwise.
While I dislike the possibility of computer expertise segmenting along economic lines (for social reasons), I do see some benefits: clearer cut job descriptions and areas of expertise, and increased adoption of open source software simply because of the price. To get to that $200 price point, you need Linux (or BSD...)
Re:More friendly than what?? (Score:4, Interesting)
- Linare helps companies to deliver against the challenge by Linux/ Open Source technology.
- Linare benefits users by providing One Stop Solution for migrating to Linux.
- This is the operating system home users have been looking for which makes the home users life easier with desktop and many other open source application.
I suspect this is more a case of extremely poor English than misleading marketing. I'm amazed that it's a US-based company -- most Taiwanese companies have better English on their sites.Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
I bought a $199 Linux PC at Frye's (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, the hardware seems OK - the salesman said that they had sold a lot of this model (totally made in China, with a Chineese Linux that immediately got replaced with a fresh SuSE install) - and no returns so far.
Anyway, I love cheap commodity hardware! That said, I wouldn't mind a dual G5 system.
-Mark
Re:Looks like a good choice for a router (Score:5, Interesting)
Slap in a firewire card you could serve several hundred gigs of movies, music, content and porn to your whole neighborhood.
Computers like that are simply too powerful to put in the hands of anyone who can afford $250.
Re:Will they donate to linux development? (Score:5, Interesting)
'Right' or 'wrong', we both know that's not going to happen with a $199 PC.
The PC market isn't known for its huge margins to begin with; I'll bet that in that particular sector *every* cent counts, and someone else would leap in and release a $5-cheaper machine without the donation.
Like it or not, that's what would happen.
Re:Once again (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, right.
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.
I walked into a store and saw one of these special offer white boxes for 300 Euros (about $360) and grabbed it immediately, for a test box. It's a K7 2400+, with 40 GB disk and a 256 MB memory stick, which I doubled just on basic principle. I could have done even better pricewise online, but nothing beats being able to walk out of the store with a new machine in less than 5 minutes. It's a fantastic machine, no real speed daemon, but that's mainly because of the IDE disk, not the processor. It compiles a 2.4 kernel in about 5 minutes, that is kickass.
I'm posting with it now, by the way. Totally solid, I haven't got a single complaint. Oh wait, the mouse was too cheap, I returned it for a 3 EU credit and got a logitech.
Technical != nerdy != academic (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an interesting insight, and it's sad to think of things being drawn along economic lines like this.
However, on the brighter side, there's another group of pessimists that have believed we'd have a technocracy, where techies rule the world (scary thought with plenty of jokes), and the non-technical ignorant masses left to collect minimum wage by flipping burgers. I've always considered this view to be too extreme. There are many fields that have technical aspects to them. Ever listen to the gibberish that car mechanics spout? They may not be nerds, and may not have college degrees, but I'd argue that they're extremely technical. Those same skills - especially troubleshooting and understanding how little details make a bigger thing work - are the exact skills that everyone needs, from programmers to network administrators.
I know a car mechanic who's picked up on the computer stuff to the point that he asks questions about trade-offs and disadvantages of PPPOE, DHCP and static IP addressing, and understands the difference between bandwidth and latency. I know many IT professionals that don't have that kind of knowledge. Of course, I know many IT professionals that became so because it was the cool career field, not because of an interest in computers.
In that sense, I think it's a very positive thing: the world now knows you don't need to be a wiry, pasty-faced, greasy dork to be good with computers. The thing that might be scary to those of us (you know who you are) who really just want to hide out in a glass room until we vest in our 401(k), this could be scary, and certainly should be taken as a wake-up call. Most of what we do with computers in the business world is inherently practical. We can draw all the cute diagrams and use the latest buzz words, but the core value we add is primarily through practical construction of some simple, maintainable systems. Fancy Visio diagrams don't change that.
As another aside, a couple years ago I was amazed to overhear conversation between two gentlemen behind me in line at Best Buy. They were the standard fare burly rednecks, with unkempt beards, in camoflage coveralls, but what they were discussing was rather different from the stereotype. With missing teeth and bad grammar, one was educating the other on why he should upgrade his video card, discussing details about how the amount of RAM as well as the RAMDAC spped and features such as T&L affect frame rate. And the other redneck dude gave all impressions of understanding the conversation.
In conclusion: the world is changing, computers aren't only in the hands of the "have"s, and in my opinion this isn't a completely horrible thing.
Thanks for listening. ;-)
Re:Actually, I wouldn't. (Score:2, Interesting)
Sales tax is not as fixed here in the US. We have 50 different States, each charging their own tax. In Wisconsin, where I happen to live, this is 5%. Add to that the fact that some counties (which there can be 100's of in a state) also charge sales tax.. and its virtually impossible to list prices with sales tax.
Yet it gets even more complicated. If I, living in Wisconsin, order something from a company in some other state, I do not have to pay ANY sales tax. But the people who live in the state that company is based in DO have to pay sales tax.
Just keep in mind that the 'United' States are also somewhat "Independent States."
I am sure you Brits have a more sensible, NATIONWIDE system
Re:wont work , support costs to much (Score:2, Interesting)
You point is valid, but that part is a little hard to swallow.
A very cheap wholesale mouse might be $1-2, a cheap keyboard maybe $3, and incredibly crappy unamplified speakers maybe $2.
Even that is getting very close to the raw materials cost of the plastic case, the semis and connectors.
On the other hand, you may have overestimated the cost of the case and power supply, I've bought cases and power supplies retail for about $12 that came with what they claimed was a 300watt PS (although judging by the weight, it was probably more like 100-150 watts).
Re:Trying to run XWindows with only 128MB of ram (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm currently working on trying to get RedHat 9 running on a P200 with 64MB of RAM. I'm going to replace KDE/Gnome with IceWM and the IceBlueCurve theme. I'm also swapping Mozilla out for Firebird (it is *much* faster).
I think that should be enough to be usable, although I don't know yet what I'm going to do about a file manager or OpenOffice.
Re:RAM? (Score:2, Interesting)
The fastest machine in the house, the Pentium III 800, is dedicated to video editing.
That is, if all the Sparc hardware is discounted. None of which is 'fast' Megahertz-wise, but a machine with dual Sparc processors each with 1 meg of cache isn't a pokey box.
Re:Creation of a blue collar computing segment (Score:3, Interesting)
Us techies were just boys that knew what we were doing - in fact it was only when we got a couple of grads that we ran into problems (no common sense, no problem solving skills, inability to RTFM, etc.).
There's no need for degrees to install and fix computers - just a lively mind, which is better found outside the graduate corps rather than inside.