Lindows at Wal-Mart

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Sometime back, some XyWriter mentioned the $199 Linux box being sold at
Wal-Mart. I have visited several Wal-Mart stores and never seen one. But
"Kim Kommando" (who's not bad) had this on her tip of the day today:

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Q. When I was at Wal-Mart, I saw a computer with Lindows. I thought
they had misspelled Windows, but they used the word several times.
And the computer was only $199. What is Lindows?

A. Lindows is Linux, not Windows. It is a relatively easy-to-use
operating system installed on a Microtel computer with a pretty low-end
chip. Several people are selling these computers, but Wal-Mart is by
far the biggest.

For $199, you get a very basic computer with a 1.1 gigahertz chip and
a 10-gigabyte hard drive. The top end is $599, and includes a 2.0GHz
Intel Pentium 4 chip, 256MB of RAM, a CD-RW drive and 20GB hard drive.
These prices do not include a monitor.

Although they are cheaper than Windows computers, you don't get as much
equipment. If you want to play modern games or do any amount of photo
or video editing, for instance, you need a more powerful computer.
You'll need a bigger hard drive if you have audio, pictures or video
files. I tried a friend's machine and found the performance too slow.

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Too slow for what? Video editing? Yeah, I do a lot of that. Not. It's the
fact that this is Linux, and that it is so cheap, that makes it
interesting. If there is a DOS emulator that is workable, we can have a
cheap Xy-machine. And then do our video-editing on a Wintel machine.


Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx