Circuit City goes Linux [LWN.net]

Circuit City has announced that it will be deploying Linux-based point of sale systems in over 600 stores. "By employing the IBM Retail Environment for SUSE Linux at the point of sale, Circuit City will have the flexibility and reliability of open standards, enabling Circuit City to adapt quickly to changes in the retail marketplace and to cost-effectively institute future upgrades to the platform."

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Circuit City goes Linux

Posted Aug 11, 2004 16:13 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

Slowly but surely, Circuit City seems to be making up for its part in the original DIVX fiasco. Anybody know what they were running before? (SCO? Windows? Some other 'nix?)

Circuit City goes Linux

Posted Aug 11, 2004 18:09 UTC (Wed) by Eudyptes (guest, #15589) [Link]

I don't know what they were running before switching their POS to SUSE
Linux, I believe windows. But now when I grill the sales person about
carrying Linux distro software and they come back with the same old crap
it's not ready, stable, usable, yada yada, I can throw the line "but CC
uses Linux" just to see what story I get. They at one time announced that
they were a M$ preferred partner (or what ever they call it) and some
vague advertisement that suggested they would only carry Windows, and the
same was true Office Depot as well. Now let's see what other M$ only
corps/shops switch over - what was that M$ was spewing about TCO and "get
the facts"...? Ya sure!

I just think it's a matter of time before we start see Linux preinstalled
(outside of Linspire/Lindows). Once Linux gets preinstalled and
preconfigured then things will get interesting - not to mention M$ will go
on full wartime status alert... LOL :)

Circuit City goes Linux

Posted Aug 11, 2004 18:42 UTC (Wed) by cliffman (guest, #13144) [Link]

Hmm. My local CC stores all run some funky green-screen POS app/terminal, which i suspect is talking to something large in the backroom ( AS/400 anyone? ) Will be looking forward to anything that improves on _that ugly.

Circuit City goes Linux

Posted Aug 11, 2004 21:19 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

>funky green-screen POS app/terminal

Nice double meaning there... <chuckle>

former top-level IT was all M$ zombies

Posted Aug 12, 2004 11:25 UTC (Thu) by jabby (guest, #2648) [Link]

My company's top-level IT staff (CIO, Senior Network Dude & friends) used to be the top-level IT at Circuit City before they joined us about five years ago. They are all serious Microsoft drones, eating up whatever comes out of Redmond like it was whipped marshmallow topping (ever see the movie "The Stuff"?). I have to imagine that there's still a large amount of Windows-based IT over there.

Circuit City goes Linux

Posted Aug 13, 2004 16:00 UTC (Fri) by TxtEdMacs (subscriber, #5983) [Link]

From my experiences with CC attempting to buy either a handheld or audio player this may not be an event to be overjoyed. From my memory we had to cancel the in store order and order on-line because of its absence as an in stock item, despite being pre-ordered and on the list to be one of the first purchasers.

This might give Linux a bad name if the IT is as bad as the in store personnel.

I hope I am wrong, but when one of these badly managered outfits goes out of business I am sure the switch to Linux will be cited as the root cause of their overly deserved demise.

Circuit City goes Linux

Posted Aug 13, 2004 17:44 UTC (Fri) by salvarsan (subscriber, #18257) [Link]

Circuit City had been using a 68030 port of OpenBSD with Posix and realtime extensions called RTMX. They had not yet ported RTMX to the x86 platform as of February 2004, so that may have decided the Circuit City move to Linux.

See: http://www.rtmx.com/

-drh
--

Circuit City goes Linux

Posted Aug 19, 2004 18:16 UTC (Thu) by msk (guest, #24125) [Link]

I'm not sure how much I am truly at liberty to reveal (I did a subcontract at the CC HQ a year ago) that wouldn't be considered too useful for a CC competitor, but I will say that when I was there, CC had a lot of *nix on the back end. And some AS/400.

Circuit City goes Linux

Posted Feb 16, 2005 21:23 UTC (Wed) by kmmccue (guest, #27945) [Link]

Actually, you guys had a lot of the facts but not all of them. There was a project at CC to replace the CC-130 which is what the Circuit City stores run on. The replacement project was called Magellan. This program came out after the RTMX project which was killed. The Magellan project uses the CC-130 and PCPOS clients running Windows XP Embedded. The Magellan solution was rolled out to approx. 100 stores before it was killed. The new project is called RPOS (short for replacement point of sale). This is the IBM solution which uses Linux. The CC-130 uses a Patapsco Designs (company was owned CC) designed mainboard which uses a Motorola 68030 running at 50 MHz. The operating system is VERSAdos and the applications are writting in Pascal. This is the "green screen" that you were mentioning. The screen is actually black and white and it runs on at dumb terminal such the one made by LINK or if you using the PCPOS client it is accessed via an Act5a emulation program.

Circuit City goes Linux

Posted Aug 29, 2005 23:41 UTC (Mon) by jpatten (guest, #32154) [Link]

As a store technician for Circuit City (who has now outsourced our jobs to ADT, an IBM partner) I can confirm that the last of these statements is true. The main sales system, the CC-130 is a 68030 motorola 50MHz VersaDOS based system with 128MB ( yes 128 MB ) of RAM and is written in pascal. The Magellan system is completely different (dual xeon with 10 or so hard drives), is written in java and is developed by HP with windows 2k server OS. The MAJOR downfall to the magellan POS system is that is completely dependant on the CC-130 POS server in every way (sales, inventory lookup, employee and customer data, you name it) so if the creaky old CC-130 hardware decides to let its smoke out (and beleive me it does happen more than you might think) the store is completely helpless and I get called out on site until it's fixed (3 or 4 A.M.) The stores have recently started receiving the new linux terminals and IBM has been on site installing the new linux server equipment in a few of my stores. I can only say one thing: It is GLORIOUS. The terminal equipment seems very sturdy, has nice eye candy, and it is under warranty for 1 year from IBM. meaning I don't get to touch it :-( Look for the new system after the holidays (Jan or Feb 2006 for most stores) because all the old veteran employees might have a tough time learning a completely different sales system before the day after thanksgiving ;-).

P.S. - RPOS stands for Retek Point of Sale from what I have read.

http://www.novell.com/industries/retail/wp_perfectstorm.html search for retek on that page