Walmart.com sells Microtel PC with SuSE Linux software (InfoWorld) [LWN.net]

InfoWorld reports that Microtel PCs with SuSE Linux 8.2 installed will be available from Walmart.com. "For SuSE, this is a first not only with Microtel, which designs, manufacturers, and customizes computers, but also with Wal-Mart, one of the biggest retailers in the U.S., Egle said. "The deal with Wal-Mart is very important to us because it opens the door to the huge U.S. consumer market," he said."

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Walmart.com sells Microtel PC with SuSE Linux software (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 15, 2003 16:40 UTC (Tue) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

How funny that Infoworld is just now catching the story--I took delivery of one of these boxes yesterday, after having been on order for a couple of weeks. My particular model is a 2.4GHz P4, with 266MHz FSB. It performs nicely (especially compared to my existing Athlon 600) :-) but it did freeze up hard once when I was compiling the simh VAX simulator. (It's rather a good chuckle to be able to telnet into a VAX running under simulation on one's Linux box...) I'm not sure what caused the freeze, but it was rather disconcerting as that's literally never happened to me before under Linux (random hard freeze). I'm going to try a Mozilla compile and if there's any hardware instability that should make it surface. The built-in video is a Savage--not the greatest but it can be replaced of course by putting a card in the AGP slot. Otherwise a great box. It came with SuSE 8.2 Personal Edition, which personally I have some issues with (gcc isn't available by default, etc. and the package manager leaves a great deal to be desired by my taste--I'm a Slackware person by tradition--but to each its own, I guess...)

Walmart.com sells Microtel PC with SuSE Linux software (InfoWorld)

Posted Jul 15, 2003 17:56 UTC (Tue) by havoc (guest, #2261) [Link]

I purchased one of these boxes a few months ago with no OS installed. for $200.00 at the time, I got a 1.0 GHz Duron, 128 MB, 20 GB. I installed SuSE 8.2 Pro, and was mostly pleased with the performance -- 256 MB would make a big performance difference. The system has a Gigabit mainboard, and shipped with the Gigabit manual. (I was pleasantly surprised.)

I have had at least one hard-lock as well, which causes me to distrust the system a bit. I run similar installations of the same OS on several older machines with no hard-locks (with the exception of my almost-6 year old flaky Gateway notebook, which occasionally hard-locks if you leave it running for 28+ days without any reboots or downtime.... go figure). Installation was fast and painless with not odd-ball hardware issues. I purchased the very bottom of the line system for testing to see if it was suitable for suggesting to people who just want a machine for surfing the net, e-mail, checkbook, and word processor duty. It serves all of those functions effectively.

For the casual user who will shut the system down when they aren't using it, I would think these systems would be “more than adequate.”