Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart $199.00
Everex’s TC2502 gPC is the first mass-market $200 desktop computer, featuring a custom distribution of Ubuntu Linux and headed for selected Wal-Mart stores.
“It’s $200, with no gimmicks or subsidies,” Everex spokesman David Liu said.
The gPC aims to joins a popular gang of low-end economy computers leading into the holiday season, such as Asus’ $300 EeePC Laptop and VIA’s $600 Nanobook. Unlike these machines, however, Everex’s latest model is a full-size desktop, and $100 cheaper than even the slightest models from Dell or HP.
Touted as a “green” machine, it has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software. By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it’s more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers.
“It’s almost like a Google PC,” Liu says, pointing to the desktop’s rack of pre-configured links to all of Google’s online applications. It is, he says, the mass-market Linux PC we’ve all been waiting for. “That’s our dream. … we go the final step to make it work out the box, to go the whole nine yards.”
Amid significant customer demand, the computer maker said on Thursday that it has returned to offering the older Windows version as an option on some of its consumer PCs.
Analysis — Dell contacted DesktopLinux.com on March 28 to let us know that the company will be releasing select desktop and notebook systems with pre-installed Linux as an option in the coming weeks.
