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Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil)
Linux in Brazil reports
on problems with a Brazilian Linux initiative.
"Computador para Todos is a government project that offers special tax exemptions and lines of credit for popular (low end) computer makers in Brazil, as long as the computers are sold with Linux and an array of 26 pre-installed free software common applications, like a word processor, an e-mail client and other apps surely found in most Linux distros. The tax exemption is only valid if the PC is sold for less than R$ 1200 (about US$ 550), retail.
According to official estimatives, more than 800,000 PCs were sold using these tax exemptions and lines of credit in 2006, with a wide variety of international and local brands of Linux distros installed, despite claims that roughly 73% of the customers replace the pre-installed Linux distro with unlicensed Windows XP copies, less than 4 weeks after buying the computer." (Thanks to Augusto Campos).
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Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 1, 2007 22:06 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] Not quite sure what they want to prove, except that Linux is not ready for most people. Unless it's about the "unhackable" Windows XP that can still be installed to get market share... ;-)
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 1, 2007 22:45 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link] > Not quite sure what they want to prove, except that Linux is not ready for most people.
Just curious, where do you get that from this article? It sounds like people aren't choosing between Linux and Windows, they're getting hobbled "Linux PCs" with incomplete configuration, and their "computer expert" friends know only Windows and bring that along to install.
Or are you referring to the "128 MiB is not enough for Linux" references? To which I'd have to reply -- just install appropriate software, e.g. AbiWord on XFCE (instead of OOo on KDE), which works fine for OLPC with that much memory.
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 2, 2007 10:08 UTC (Fri) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link] I've been to South America and there are alot of Linux competent people there. They now how to install new stuff onto their computers, but the fact still is that Windows98+IE+Word requires less from your computer, than Ubuntu+OO.org+firefox. I'm Sorry to inform you that the DSL stack really isn't that good, try use Siag/Dillo/BadWordCopy, you have to go all the way to get something usefull..
OLPC wasn't working properly with 128MB last time I checked, trial versions were shipped with 256MB, that might have changed in the last two-three months though. It probably will be working in the end, but not without extensive hacking.
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 2, 2007 10:48 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] KDE+konqueror+koffice might actually fit with 128MB. But only barely.
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 2, 2007 13:37 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] beleive it or not memory usage benchmarks I've seen have had gnome vs kde memory usage pretty close to one another. Within a couple megs.
Instead of OO.org or Koffice you probably want to look at Abiword, which is a tight little C program and has good document compatability with Microsoft Office doc formats. It's the fastest, smallest full-featured word proccessor I've ever used.
I realy do like Koffice, but unfortunately the most important thing for a Linux word proccessor or Office Suite is MS office compatability and there isn't anything you can do about it. OO.org is the best in my estimation at that sort of thing.
I don't know how Gnumeric compares to OO.org to spreadsheet stuff though.
Personally the 'lowest' machine I use is my desktop at work running Gnome from CentOS. I have newer versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, and OO.org 2.x installed and have them running at the same time.
The machine is 300-500mhz and 256megs worth of ram. It's usable and I am quite able to get my work done. Not fun, but I don't need the horsepower of a faster machine. Switching between applications takes a bit for things to swap around.
It's realy bizzare actually. Another forum I goto has people juicing all over Vista and such. They say insane things like "I have a AMD 3800 X2 with 2gigs of RAM and a geforce FX5950xt ultra.. I know this is low on the resources, but do you think its good enough for Vista?"
It blows my mind.
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 2, 2007 14:02 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] Well, the "competition" is not really fair of you consider OOo as the office suite for gnome and if you consider a gecko-based browser as the web-browser for gnome.
You can use abiword and gnumeric (what about Present?), but epiphany uses gecko. Make it use gtkhtml (and make gtkhtml good enough) and then you could compare real gnome-vs-kde efficiency.
BTW: abiword is written in C++. It also supported Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac before OOo did, IIRC.
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 2, 2007 20:59 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link] I've used Epiphany and Firefox (not at the same time) along with Sylpheed(for e-mail), Abiword and Gnumeric on 96MB P166 desktop (Ubuntu Breezy) and 96MB 330Mhz laptop (SUSE 9.3) machine. The P166 is too slow for everyday use, but the laptop is fully usable. 96MB is enough memory if you don't run browser at the same time with the other applications, otherwise the machine can start swapping a bit. This is with IceWM window manager though, with something like Xubuntu XFCE you'd want at least 128MB of RAM. A bit more CPU power wouldn't hurt either though.
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 3, 2007 16:59 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Compare it with Microsoft's stack: Windows98+IE6+Word2000. It works on P133 with 48MB RAM just fine. Of course it's old and unsupported versions of everything, but they work and there are nothing comparable for Linux :(
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 4, 2007 12:20 UTC (Sun) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link] > Windows98+IE6+Word2000. It works on P133 with 48MB RAM just fine. Of> course it's old and unsupported versions of everything, but they work > and there are nothing comparable for Linux Especially in (security) bug count... :-) The versions I used were latest ones and supported. Cairo has made things a bit slower (and prettier) after that though in Ubuntu Dapper etc. The funny thing about the setup I had was that Gecko-HTML engine in Mozilla & Epiphany rendered the pages as fast as the 33Kbs modem could fetch them, only the rest of the UI was pretty slow (menu and dialog opening, scrolling the page) in comparison. Compared to Gt2, Gtk1 would have been faster (and use less memory), but by today's standards it flickers too much (no double-buffering), characters are blocky (no anti-aliasing) and it doesn't really support I18N in addition to it being unsupported. If you want to go really low, the programs on my old 8Mhz Atari ST with 4MB RAM and monochrome worked pretty well and one could even browse web with it.... Nowadays one could get low spec (e.g. thin client) machines which use very little power compared to the old machines with similar capabilities though so I don't see much point in trying to resurrect *really* old machines except in emulators. ;-)
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 4, 2007 19:14 UTC (Sun) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link] Pull down an older version of slackware and run ICE or WM and it will work just as well on those same old machines. I ran Slack on a 386DX with 8MB RAM once upon a time, and it was good. Unfortunately, those versions are no longer supported, but of course neither is Win98, so the situation isn't much worse.
Still, I think it's sad. I hate to see so much developer time focused on bloated inefficient crap DEs and stuff, but I guess until I can afford to pay these guys I can't really complain about what they choose to spend their time on. I can certainly observe that 'success' hasn't been without it's drawbacks though. It seems like most developers these days use machines so powerful they don't even notice the bloat.
The brighter side Posted Feb 1, 2007 22:23 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] On the brighter side, it means about 200,000 GNU/Linux users. For many of them, it's their first OS. For others, it replaces non-free software. I think only a little fraction of the buyers use the tax break to upgrade from another free OS.If the proposed changes are implemented, we'll see higher numbers of users staying with GNU/Linux. And the software modems will lose relevance in the coming years.
Even bottom-end systems can run Linux well Posted Feb 1, 2007 23:57 UTC (Thu) by freeio (guest, #9622) [Link] Just for a sense of what the marketplace can do, I took a look at what Dell offers at the bottom end. Now I am no great fan of Dell, but at the very least they provide a point of comparison. Their bottom end Dimension E521 (priced 2007/2/1 at US$359 w/o monitor) comes with a Sempron 3400+ CPU and 512MB of main memory, which is absolutely plenty to run even the most CPU intensive gnu/linux GUIs and desktop applications. I have a system with an Athlon XP 1600+ that is quite satisfactory with KDE 3.5 and openoffice.org running. So assuming some market efficiencies, building gnu/inux systems in the less than $550 including monitor price range is quite possible.
The question of configuration and software setup will always be with us. Pre-installation of gnu/linux on a system is great if done cluefully. I suspect that at least part of the problem is that some system builders do not know/care about proper gnu/linux system configuration, and do not do it right. This reflects badly upon them, but indirectly and unnecessarily upon the gnu/linux system itself.
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 2, 2007 2:52 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] I can't read Portuguese, but "roughly 73%" is suspicious. It smacks of artificial precision added to a wild guess in order to make it sound more scientific. If it's rough, why not say an even three out of four? Because it sounds like you must know what you're talking about if you use an odd number.
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 2, 2007 12:40 UTC (Fri) by autobrain (subscriber, #41945) [Link] The numbers provided in November by the publicized report were rounded to the nearest integer. According to it, 72% of users interviewed by the institute answered that they replaced Linux by Windows, and 1% said they replaced it by "Microsoft". I don't have the raw data, so I can't simply add these 2 rounded integers like they weren't rounded, and tell you it was "73", squarely.
But certainly it was a little less than your 3 out of 4 figure ;-)
I can't vouch for the report, or its accuracy. I certainly don't like it. But days after it came to light, there were intense (and publicized) talks, inside government circles, of running a new research, or series of polls, to contradict it. But no new report ever come to light.
BR-Linux.org, Linux in Brazil's parent site in portuguese, asked the community (also in November) for evidence that could contradict the original numbers, but found none. Instead, it confirmed that most users really didn't keep the original "Computador para Todos" free OS, and that the common reasons for it were the ones appointed in the featured article.
Brazilian government will update its tax-exempt Linux computers initiative (Linux in Brazil) Posted Feb 2, 2007 16:16 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] Thanks for the detailed response.
Does anyone know the if those boxes could run vista? Posted Feb 3, 2007 19:17 UTC (Sat) by dps (subscriber, #5725) [Link] Any clues about the specification of these boxen? I hear that vista has problems with anything much less than 1Gb of ram, so micro$oft might be safe from people replacing linux with vista.
When I installed linux (SLS 1.03, kernel 0.99pl13) the advice was that for a usable system with X11 you need at least a 486DX33 and 8Mb of memory. My box was 48DX2/50 and 8Mb of memory. Binaries where a.out format, creating a shared library involved an email address and OOo simply did not exist.
8Mb of memory might not be enough in these days of 100Mb gcc processes and kernel images of more than 1Mb. Linux is subject to bloat too :-)
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