Wal-Mart breaks price barrier with Linspire Linux laptop
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Walmart.com is offering a laptop that dives below the $500 pricepoint, and it&#39;s no accident the machine, from Linspire, runs a Linux-based operating system.
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Asustek Computer&#39;s Linux-based Eee PC laptop will soon be on sale in North America and Europe, and the company plans to offer a version running Windows XP by the end of the year.The Eee PC is a&#160;low-cost laptop&#160;designed primarily for children and emerging markets such as India. It weighs less than a kilogram, has a 7-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) screen and can connect to the Internet wirelessly. The&#160;first version went on sale earlier this month&#160;in Asia, including in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it&#39;s priced at about NT$11,100 (US$340)On Nov. 1 the Eee PC will go on sale at stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Vancouver and Toronto, and also through e-commerce Web sites in North America, Asustek officials said Tuesday. It will then be rolled out gradually in Europe, starting in Germany on Nov. 9. Major Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, will follow in mid-November.The first Eee PCs run a Linux operating system from Xandros. By the end of the year, Asustek will also offer versions running Microsoft&#39;s Windows XP.Pricing for the laptops in Europe and North America hasn&#39;t been announced. In Taiwan, the price difference between the XP and Linux versions will be about NT$1,000, Asustek said in a statement.Asustek has shipped about 100,000 Eee PCs so far, and by the end of the year it&#39;s targeting 400,000, said Jerry Shen, Asustek&#39;s president, at an investor conference Tuesday in Taiwan. Next year it expects to ship 3.8 million of the laptops.&quot;We&#39;re in talks with a few governments and we have already confirmed orders for 1 million units next year,&quot; said Sunny Han, global marketing director.Asustek reaffirmed its commitment to push the price of the Linux-based Eee PC down to US$199, nearly the same price as the XO laptop developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project. OLPC is pricing the laptops at $200, according to its Givemany and Laptopgiving donor programs.One of the biggest costs for the Eee PC is taxes, Shen said. VAT (value added tax) and other taxes have a big impact on price. Governments interested in buying Eee PCs for education could get a better price by waiving such taxes, he said. An Eee PC sold to a government without taxes factored in would cost around $199, while the price increases to about $300 with taxes.The configuration of the laptops also affects the price, with the amount of flash memory and DRAM (dynamic RAM), the camera and battery having the biggest influence, he said. The price of the kind of flash memory Asustek is using for data storage in the Eee PCs has gone up recently.Earlier this month, Asustek announced four Eee PC laptop configurations it planned to sell in stores and online, all running Linux software.The least expensive was the &quot;Surf&quot; with a 2GB flash memory drive and 256MB of DDR2 (double data rate, second generation) DRAM, to retail for NT$7,999 when it comes out around the end of November. Another version of the Surf included a 4GB flash drive and 512MB of DDR2 DRAM, and will cost NT$9,999 when it comes out in mid-November. Both laptops have an Intel microprocessor.Two higher-priced Eee PCs were also launched. The NT$11,100 version included a built-in camera and speakers, and can carry out simple voice commands such as &quot;computer, access the Internet,&quot; or &quot;computer, make a phone call.&quot; It contains a 900MHz Intel Celeron M processor, 512MB of DDR2 DRAM and a 4GB flash drive. The other laptop, at NT$13,888 and due out at the end of November, carries an 8GB flash drive and 1GB of DDR2 DRAM in addition to features similar to the NT$11,100 version.At the launch ceremony, Asustek also showed off one Eee PC running Microsoft Windows XP Professional, version 2002, Service Pack 2. The hardware on board was the same as for the NT$11,100 Linux-based Eee PC. The Windows XP-Eee PC included Office 2003 versions of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  said on Friday its Sam's Club unit will start selling Dell Inc.  notebook computers for $899 each at more than 580 U.S. stores beginning in mid-June.
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Blog: Everex announces Wal-Mart will carry its Windows-based, back-to-school $298 desktop, which features open-source productivity software.
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Wal-Mart, the world largest supermarket chain, is offering a laptop for only $498 (about Rs 21,000) during the festive season in the United States!
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With $100 rebate, Sears--a major national retailer that doesn't specialize in electronics--offers a Linux desktop PC from Linspire.
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Wal-Mart is reducing the price of its online program.
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Q: We are in the market for a new computer, which we would use mostly for e-mail, the Internet, letters and reports. I&#39;ve read about a PC sold online by Wal-Mart that runs Linux instead of Windows.
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A laptop under $100 could reach desks if a new venture formed by the former&#160;CTO of One Laptop Per Child, Mary Lou Jepsen, can deliver on its promises.A &quot;spin-out&quot; from OLPC, the company, Pixel Qi is looking to create a $75 laptop and trying to advance low-cost computers and power-efficient laptops, mobile phones, and other consumer electronics that are sunlight readable, Jepsen wrote on the company&#39;s Web site.Jepsen left OLPC two weeks ago to commercialize technologies she invented with OLPC, she said in an e-mail to the IDG News Service at the time. A patent lists Jepsen as one of the inventors of a display system optimized for low-power operation.&quot;Spinning out from OLPC enables the development of a new machine, beyond the XO [laptop], while leveraging a larger market for new technologies,&quot; Jepsen wrote.There is a big commercial market for technology spawned by OLPC, Jepsen wrote. Prices for next-generation hardware can be brought down by allowing multiple uses of key technology advances, she wrote.The company will continue to work with OLPC by providing products at cost, and it will sell devices at a profit to commercial organizations.A similar promise to introduce a low-cost laptop came from OLPC, when it launched the $100 XO laptop in 2005. Since then, the effort has been afflicted by production delays and rising costs, which caused the laptop&#39;s estimated price to rise to $200. It is now beset by waning orders and competition from commercial vendors that threaten to sideline the nonprofit effort.As CTO, Jepsen was responsible for hardware development for the rugged and power-saving XO laptop, designed for use by children in developing countries. Though the laptop has struggled to find buyers, it has been praised for its environmentally friendly design and innovative display, hardware and networking features.Her departure from OLPC spawned a debate, with critics charging that Jepsen was taking advantage of OLPC&#39;s nonprofit inventions for personal gains, but supporters shot back, saying it was the right time for her to leave a sinking ship.Jepsen, who is attending the&#160;International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, was not available for comment.
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Microsoft and the OLPC are working on a laptop that would be capable of running Windows and Linux, but it's not a dual-boot system. Sort of.
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Linspire Linux teams with Mirus Innovations to sell low-cost PCs to consumers and business users through Sears.
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(InfoWorld) - Linspire has signed up a company headed by a former Microsoft executive to distribute its desktop Linux operating system in the Middle East and Africa. Business International will offer the English version of the Linspire Five-0 operating system to customers in at least 17 countries, Linspire said in a statement. The company is headed by Mohamad Jarrar, who worked at Microsoft from 1997 until last year as a business development manager expanding the company's business and its partner network in the Middle East. As part of the deal, Business International will also build a channel program that will enable OEM computer makers to offer PCs with Linspire preinstalled. The deal will see Business International handle distribution in Algeria, Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, India, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, Linspire said. Next year, the two companies will start development work on an Arabic version of the operating system. The announcement was timed to coincide with the Gitex Dubai 2006 IT show that ends Wednesday at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre.
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Wal-Mart Stores  on Tuesday  posted a better-than-expected quarterly profit as  penny-pinching U.S. shoppers scoured its discount stores for  low prices on necessities like food and laundry detergent to  offset tough economic conditions.
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TORONTO, Dec. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Sub300.com, North America&#39;s only Linux-only store, challenges all Microsoft Windows users to make the switch to Linux by offering to install Linspire, Firefox and OpenOffice free of charge to any computer system.
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The retailer trots out a bargain portable PC that packs Wi-Fi. Is it getting ready for a laptop push for the holidays?
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Walmart and Linspire (formerly Lindows) have partnered up to sell a sub $500 laptop through the large retail chain. &quot;Walmart.
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The company which at one time blatantly attacked Microsoft's position on the consumer desktop with what was then called "Lindows," a Linux distro aimed at low-price systems sold in major department stores, announced today a 180-degree change of tack, adding its name to those of Novell and Xandros to become the third Linux distributor to reach a patent covenant agreement with Microsoft. In finding the courage to shake hands with the enemy, Linspire's president and CEO this morning publicly compared himself to Steve Jobs.