$199 KDE PC available from Walmart

Saturday, 10 January 2004  |  Kpfeifle

According to a recent news item at DesktopLinux.com, Walmart.com now offers a "1.3 Ghz AMD processor, host 128 MB of RAM, 30 GB of hard-drive space, ethernet interface, keyboard, mouse and speaker" PC for a mere $US 199.95. The system is "fully loaded with Linare's Linux, based on KDE" and "the system comes with access to Linare's 24-hour, seven-day-a-week technical support phone line." A more detailed description of the hardware is available on the website of Linare, the software is described here. The PCs are also available from Amazon.com. Earlier last year,
CNET News.com reported on the plans of the PC maker to offer an e-mail service as well.

Comments:

linuxworld - jmk - 2004-01-10

Any chances on getting one from NYC during next linuxworld (somewhere around manhattan)?

OO.o? - Synonymous coward - 2004-01-10

Good luck trying to run openoffice with 128 megs of memory :) Good thing KDE doesn't require so much.

Re: OO.o? - David - 2004-01-10

Well, maybe koffice could get the attention it deserves? OO.o is in my opinion totally bloted memory hungry and ugly application(s). I personally just love kword and I don't need the compability for MS Word... /Dave

Re: OO.o? - David - 2004-01-10

ooops, should be bloated!

Re: OO.o? - noname - 2004-01-10

I love KWord. I don't need printing capabilities...

Re: OO.o? - David - 2004-01-10

And I love replies :) but don't really need them...

Re: OO.o? - kalle - 2004-01-10

Do you love KOffice? No, I love my wife!

Re: OO.o? - Thomas2 - 2004-01-11

Well, I like KWord, and I use it for a lot of short (one-page) documents. However, if you ever tried to create a document with 10s or even 100s of pages, tables, graphics etc., you'll quickly realize that OO.o is not yet obsolete. Again, I like KWord and I hope to see it prosper, but you'll have to face the fact, that it still does have a long way to go in order to fully replace OO.o. Thomas

Re: OO.o? - Luke Sandell - 2004-01-11

Ya, KWord even admits that it's not optimized for large documents.

Re: OO.o? - David - 2004-01-11

That's true, but I believe and hope that kword will reach a phase where it is adequate for most "normal" needs. But maybe the biggest problem is to attract enough programmers... to speed up the development! Koffice will eventually have it's revenge =) /David

Re: OO.o? - Freddled gruntbuggly - 2004-01-11

No, OO.o is definitely not obsolete :) Its rather in its early years, and undergoing rapid development. Healthy competition all round.

Re: OO.o? - rinse - 2004-01-11

Open office is in it's early yeras? It's allmost 20 years old!! (I guess, when was StarOffice founded?) Rinse

Re: OO.o? - Bryce Hardy - 2004-01-14

I'm not a professional user or anything, but I run OOo on my home computer all the time. It's a Celeron 766 with 128MB, running SuSE 9.0. It does take a long time to initially load, but I keep everything from my budget spreadsheet to my DVD Collection in it and it seems to be fine.

128... - Source - 2004-01-10

Just doesn't make sense, it's a 1.3 Ghz machine! 128Mb RAM? I got my PII 350Mhz running KDE 3.1.4 and OpenOffice.Org. OOo is preloaded with quickstarter. Everything runs fine, the whole system is quite responsive and I believe that it's more than enough to many people out there. But I have 256+32Mb RAM on that machine! Anyway, nice initiative.

Re: 128... - noname - 2004-01-10

Slow systems for slow users.

Re: 128... - djay - 2004-01-10

Yep, kde feels so much better from 256 megs on. I've tried it on a PIII600 and going from 128 TO 256 makes it much comfortable to use. Yet, it IS usable aith a 600 and 128, but kinda slow-i-sh. Going from pIII600 to 2000 didnt bring as much of a change as going 256 from 128.

I would have used - jediwolf - 2004-01-10

I would have used fedora it is more user freindly most first time use my get lost!

Re: I would have used - ciasa - 2004-01-10

huh?

Re: I would have used - cm - 2004-01-10

Is Yoda that you?

No CD or Floppy Drives? - dapawn - 2004-01-10

Not that I am a Lindows fan, but unlike Linare's $199 computer, Lindow's PC at walmart.com comes with a 1.4 GHz Duron plus a CD Rom (no floppy though).<br> <a href="http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?cat=3951&dept=3944&product_id=2293918"> http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?cat=3951&dept=3944&product_id=2293918</a> <p> That said, I am excited to see more vendors in the cheap PC market pre-installing KDE based Linux distributions. This is a large market, and I believe success here is the first step to conquering many user's desktops. I hope that these vendors take the time and care to setup KDE so that these users' first experience with KDE and Linux will be pleasurable. <p> I'm constantly amazed at the progress KDE has made in only a few years. KDE is an incredibly configurable, feature-full, and integrated environment all at the same time. Of course there is still work to be done, and I hope that the developers will continue to polish every area of KDE, but I'm proud to call KDE my desktop environment of choice!

Aldi - kalle - 2004-01-10

WalMart got bankrupt in Germany, or at least their expansion strategy failed. The prices were to expensive so wired. 154,78 EURO or alike, I read in an US Marketing book it shall indicate sharp calculation to the customer... well, we are not that stupid :-) However it would be nice to see an ALDI Linux :-) Again I will fill out Medion's guestionaires at CeBIt 04 asking for a Linux PC :-)

Linare - MandrakeUser - 2004-01-10

Anyone has any info on Linare's OS ? Is it .deb based ? RPM based ? Distrowatch has no info on Linare because, well, Linare does not provide any apparently ...

Re: Linare - Freddled gruntbuggly - 2004-01-11

I met some guys from Linare. They started from redhat9, threw away whatever Joe Enduser doesn't need (its a single CD distro. They gave me one, never got time to try it), and they bought licenses from Fraunhofer and a couple of other prop. formats.

Re: Linare - MandrakeUser - 2004-01-12

Thanks a lot Freddled, that's the first piece of info I get on Linare ;-) It wouldn't hurt them to give some technical details on their site ...

Re: Linare - Mahesh - 2006-04-26

The comoany is now closed, our attempts to reach Linare ceo Mr. Soma has been unsucessful. Can any one help us to reach Linare representatives.

Re: Linare - Gordy - 2005-01-27

Linare is RedHat based

Re: Linare - Tov - 2006-08-14

I bought the Linare INBS250. Its a fine machine. I ran Linspire 4.5 then Linspire 5.0 and now Mepis 6. I've been very happy with it. I'm sorry to see they closed shop. http://www.gospelinux.net

1.3 GHz and 128 MB of RAM - James Richard Tyrer - 2004-01-11

Not a very good choice. 256 MB of RAM and a slower processor would be a much better choice. OTOH, I suppose that you can add more RAM. But, if you aren't going to add RAM, this is clearly a poor choice. -- JRT

Re: 1.3 GHz and 128 MB of RAM - Freddled gruntbuggly - 2004-01-11

Yes its definitely a poor choice. This system isn't aimed at the kind of people who would add more RAM. They wouldn't even know it exists. Unfortunately these people also think more gigahertz == faster (deliberately propagated by intel) and so they wouldn't settle for a "slow" machine.