Walmart Expands Low-End Linux Notebook Offerings 384
startleman writes "A story on Tom's Hardware reports that Walmart apparently will offer a Linare-equipped notebook below the $500 mark. Manufacturer Linare said that it will bring a Linux-based device to the retailer 'within the next few days.' Specs include an AMD Athlon 1800+, a 40 GByte harddrive, 128 MByte memory, a CD-ROM drive, an Ethernet port and the firm's Linare OS as well as Open Office."
fp (Score:0, Interesting)
Typical user? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, most people use Windows or Mac for their primary desktop. Hardly any users that buy their computers at Walmart are running Linux on their main machine. So what are they going to do with this laptop? It's not really compatible with their standard machine.
My best guess is that the hardware is basic enough that they can probably install Win98 on it with very little trouble. This is a computer for software license violaters, in that case.
Put it in the store! (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank you.
Can you put your own linux on these? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes when you buy a linux machine, it comes with binary drivers that make it hard to run with a mainstream distro.
Re:Typical user? (Score:5, Interesting)
I tend to see this as one giant corporate bully giving another giant corporate bully notice. Walmart pushes everyone they buy from to lower their prices. This is just their way of trying to muscle MS.
Before Christmas, I saw a complete HP system at Wal-Mart for $468. It was a WinXP box with 256MB of RAM and a monitor. It even came with a CD burner.
Wal-Mart's just trying to break through that price level. It probably ain't going to happen unless MS takes a smaller cut.
Low End Trend? (Score:4, Interesting)
Did they get the right Lin* (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:fp? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most people who complain about speed, complains about start-up times, which isn't a problem on Linux, since you can start all the applications you need and leave them running forever. There is no need to quit an application - just switch desktops.
If you use Linux, then you should think Linux - if you use Linux in single tasking mode as if it is a MS Winblows machine and is forever starting and quitting programs, then you deserve to suffer...
Re:Many Things Missing (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, they seem rather fishy, I can't find any reference to GPL or ANY license for that matter on their site, even when trying to purchase the product. According to their list of software they are also including some commercial apps (i.e. RealPlayer). I would think they are legally obligated to include some sort of licensing info up front.
My 2 cents anyway...
That's not a proprietary window manager. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No USB ports & 1000? (Score:5, Interesting)
Something else that looked strange: Linare said it will ship "more than 1000 notebooks" to Walmart stores in the US.
We are talking about all of the USA. Doesn't 1000 seem like a rather small number? That is NOT a real Walmart level shipment of product. What is that all about? (Considering the margins are small on this thing, the total profit on that volume would probably not even buy a street legal used car here in the USA.) They might as well have said they will ship more than a dozen notebooks.
Power!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Now for gaming, my laptop and these machines are not good, but for a student who needs OpenOffice and net, or someone who wants mobility away from their gaming desktop... why not?
Enough power for some (Score:5, Interesting)
I like my desktops, and have stayed there so far, but something like this could almost convince me to try my hands at a mobile work/hobby environment. Hell, the lack of wireless would not only make it more secure, but less of a distraction than my laptop usually proves to be.
Whether or not I get one, there is plenty of reason to believe this machine is a good thing, much as the $100 PC Projects that have been touted by several groups as the next great humanitarian effort and have been reported here on here on Slashdot.
Universities won't like it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Moreover does it have at least wireless drivers built in? Retrofitting Linux drivers into a notebook machine for a PCCard NIC is not a pretty sight even for well known distros that support it. And if I can't at least use wireless at home then a notebook is largely useless to me.
It's really $600 for a 256MB RAM unit.
Last but not least how does this compare with a more mainstream refurbished notebook machine? This unit is a little on the low end side and compares with maybe a 2-3 year old maintstream unit.
Old news (Score:2, Interesting)
These things also don't have a PCMCIA slot, so if all you need is a cheap wireless laptop that runs sluggishly, this might be a good deal for you. I should note that linux runs fine on my $350 Ebayed P3 Thinkpad, though.
Laptops becoming a commodity item (Score:2, Interesting)
The things that make laptops expensive are no longer as special as they were a short while ago. 15" LCDs are now a couple of hundred bucks. Run of the mill hard drives are becoming smaller and smaller. NiMH batteries are quite good and are much cheaper than more exotic types. The result is that laptops should be not a lot more expensive than desktops in the near future.
When IBM sold their laptop operation it was because they saw the writing on the wall. We're beginning to see lots of small companies producing laptops. We aren't quite at the point of being able to assemble your own laptop from parts but we're getting close. Desktops have been a commodity for a long time; laptops soon will be.
Re:Universities won't like it? (Score:3, Interesting)
In answer to your question, the $600 version has "wireless support".
Also, I don't think this is really all that low-end, it's a 1.8ghz processor, the 256 ram is "nice" but upgrade that to 512 and you've got a very nice laptop on your hands (for cheap).
Cheap "home gateway"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine someone having several computers in their home. Maybe one of these laptops could be used as a relatively cheap file/backup/mail server. Throw in a PCMCIA card and you may even use it as a gateway or firewall.
The reason I say it's cheap, by the way, is the form factor. Naturally a desktop system with similar or better specs would be even cheaper. But this seems to me it's cheaper than other alternatives with comparable form factors. You could configure this laptop to run with the lid closed and that gives you a relatively sleek box which also draws little power.
Re:Universities won't like it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Walmart News Gives Me A Headache. (Score:3, Interesting)
What they do seem to do rather effectively, is fuel price races to the bottom in every field they enter. This can't be good for any community. I would rather pay a few dollars more to buy a product from a local business, or a local geek to provide the same product or service.
http://injoke.org/index.php?title=daily_show_wal_m art_piece [injoke.org]
Re:Universities won't like it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tech specs. (Score:2, Interesting)
And it would be truly amazing to have a FireWire port, and no USB ports. Though what's truly disappointing is no built-in wireless. I worry about PC Card wireless adapters getting snapped off, and if there's no USB... And really, the whole point of a laptop these days is wireless.
Feh, oh well, for less than $500 maybe it's worth it. Then again...
Re:Universities won't like it? (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, my school (GTech) allows us to download XP Pro if you are enrolled as a student in some of the departments.
Re:It's just a throw away for them (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:yes, but does it... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen MANY un-PC-edumacated people kicking away on Windows boxes that never changed the default wallpaper. The Linare puke-green-flem-ball pic wouldn't (L)inspire me to even WANT to use that PC.
Anyhews, I hope this goes over well regardless. Seeing more and more cheap boxes with Linux preinstalled is DoublePlusGood, right?
Just say no! (Score:2, Interesting)
Wal-Mart isn't saving you money. Spend a little more and buy a used Powerbook, or a stripped-down Dell.
The less people that shop and buy at Wal-Mart, the better off this whole country will be.
This is a great step, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is all well and good. If you have $500 to burn and want to experiment with a proprietary version of Linux, this is your bag. For the rest of us, I'd suggest visiting your friendly garage sale or used computer depot for a good solid 750mhz PC to throw Fedora on for grandma and grandpa who are Lin-curious. Power Users that don't want to give Microsoft their share of PC sales cash have options. Build your own machine even.
So this leaves this option kind of in the air. The only reason I would see to buy it, would be to get a fully functional system, format, and install Gentoo.
Nice try, but not quite home-calibur Linux <b>yet</b>.
still expensive (2) (Score:3, Interesting)
14 inch LCD
DVD drive
56k modem
10/100 ethernet
2 pcmcia slots
ATI radeon (works fine with linux opengl drivers) 256 megs ram (I upgraded to 512)
1.5ghz PIV
Windows XP Home (formated it and installed Debian
3 usb (version 1 not 2 unfortunatly) ports.
The only thing that sucked was the soundcard/speakers and the Microsoft tax. It only cost $600. Acording to moore's law (I know technecally it's about density, not price or performance) that kind of computer should be down to $300 by now (half price at the 18 month mark, and I give it a little extra leway.) Other machines have gone WAY down in price. I just bought a sun machine:
2 gig ram
4 way SMP (450mhz each)
4 redundant power supplies
It cost me $200 and runs solaris 10 great. It would have cost me at least $2,000 two years ago. Why is PC hardware, particularly laptops, still so expensive? On the high end the specs are going up so the price/performance ratio is higher, but at the low end, things have stagnated or even gotten more expensive. Cheap laptops cost more now then they did years ago. New SD-RAM is more expensive then it used to be and often more expensive then faster DDR RAM. CPU performance has also grown slowly in the low end dispite the constant clockspeed increeses. It took the desktop over a decade since the technology was available (the mips R4000 came out in 1991) to go 64 bit.
Intel is certainly part of the problem in spite of their recent 180 on the mhz myth and adoption of AMD64 for the Xeon. I have a pentium II 450mhz system with 512k L2 cache, and a PA-RISC system with 1.5meg L1 cache. I even have an ancient sgi Indy with a 200mhz mips processor with 1meg cache. Why do new Celerons still only have 256k L2 cache and PIVs only have 1meg L2 cache? Up to about 2 megs you will still get significant performance increeses by adding more cache. I understand the Itanium2 has a 9meg on chip L3 cache, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons its price/performance ratio stucks ass. However, there is a happy medium between the PIV and Itanium when it commed to cache. AMD is in the same boat with a 1meg L2 on the Athlon64.
Microsoft is part of the problem, but this certainly isn't the case for this walmart computer. It might be a step in the right direction, but the industry can produce better desktops and laptops cheaper.
Re:Warranty? (Score:4, Interesting)
It takes a gutsy business to promise to refund almost everything it sells, in any condition, ever, in cash (even if you pay with a credit card, as I usually do). They've made a lot of money from me because of it.
Re:No USB ports? (Score:3, Interesting)
The photo has 4 USB's ports, but I dont show the Firewire, wonder if its the same model...
Re:What kind of MBA retards are in charge of the (Score:3, Interesting)
I run Window Maker. It uses 800kB of RAM (this is why a pixmap-only theme, the default config uses 300kB). I used to have a 166Mhz Pentium box with 48M of RAM (96M swap) and it was Window Maker + Konqueror (2.something) + Gaim + xchat + emacs fine. Mozilla wasn't touchable (then again, there was no Firefox at the time and M17 was sloooowwww). Compile times were slow but reasonable for a system of its speed. Things sped up a bit when I made the background a solid color instead of a pixmap (and used a non-pixmap theme in Window Maker).
If you run a smallish window manager and have at least 48M of RAM (one of the 16M SIMMs went bad so I had to swap memory around and ended up at only 32M after convincing my friend that his Indy didn't need RAM and then it wasn't usable) everything will run fine. OO.o will be basically unusable (at least 641b was, it's certainly better now since 641b is ancient) but KOffice and Applixware Office (yeah, remember that? It was $30 and kind of worth it...SHELF is neat little programming language at least) run great. Eventually I was able to snatch some PC66 for free and got up to 64M with a blazingly fast (note that this was 2001ish so you should laugh) K6/233Mhz and the system was very usable.
I actually ran Quake 3 at around 25fps @ 640x480x16 after I replaced the TrioV64+ with a Voodoo3. Team Arena and Solider of Fortune weren't really playable though. Heretic II got above 40fps and I wasted way too much time on that (This was when Loki games were going for $10 a pop at EBGames). Sim City 3k didn't run well at all, even with 64M (funny how the one 2D game needed more RAM than the 3d ones...).
The point is, 128M of RAM is a lot. Not when you are running KDE 3 or GNOME 2 on it, but if you stick to running Window Maker (or Fluxbox, IceWM, XFCE, etc.) and using Konqueror or Mozilla (or Galeon or Firefox) it will work fine. OO.o might not be too happy but KOffice works fine unless you need to do super heavy duty word processing. You might be surprised at how well KDE/GNOME apps run when you aren't running the entire desktop environment.
If it weren't Walmart (which I refuse to shop at for ethical reasons, they are an evil evil company) I'd be tempted to buy one of these and throw Debian onto it.
Note that I still run Window Maker even though I have a dual AthlonMP 2800+ system with a gig of RAM :-)
Re:Tech specs. (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm assuming the USB omission was a typo. They didn't state that it had a PS/2 mouse port, keyboard connector or power connection either; I think this is just implied.
Re:Enough power for some (Score:3, Interesting)
as for wifi, you can get a cheap linksys pc card for $30. a $100 or so PC is a different issue, as the monitor and keyboard are separate. problem with laptops is, and has always been, ergonomics. cheap comes at a price. honestly, unless you're doing windows development, and since this laptop runs linux so you won't be, get an old ibook or thinkpad on ebay. for the same price you're getting much better hardware and the performance hit is minor unless you're rendering a 30MB photoshop file or something. my 700mhz G3 ibook is still great for tons of stuff, and you can pick them up on ebay for around $600. an ibm 700-900mhz P3 goes for around $400. these were once top of the line, with the better screens, keyboards, hard drives, etc., not bottom barrel crap thrown together for a few sheckels. pennywise and pound foolish. i'll tkae older quality over newer crap any day of the week.
The alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately The question is whether people want to pay thrice the competitors' price for clothing made here in the US or any where else with well compensated workers. No I don't work for American Aparel [americanapparelstore.com] but their ads caught my attention a while back. I was dismayed they did not do online shopping but that has since changed.
As for the topic at hand, the moral disadvantages of buying an especially cheap computer are perhaps counter-balanced by the environmental advantages of buying a small form factor machine?
mac mini killer (Score:1, Interesting)