Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Need for low-cost PCs helps Linux in India

Filed under
Linux

Aiming at India's volume PC market, two vendors this week launched entry-level products that run Linux and are priced at about US$230.

Backing these initiatives is the country's minister for communications and information technology, Dayanidhi Maran, whose aim is to increase PC penetration in the country.

Currently, 15 million people in India own a PC and there are 5 million Internet connections in the country, according to Maran. The aim of the Indian government is to increase the number of people owning a PC to 75 million and the number of Internet connections to 45 million by 2010. To achieve this objective, the country needs low-cost PCs, said Maran at a launch Monday in Chennai, commenting on a $230 PC from HCL Infosystems Ltd., a large PC vendor in Noida, near Delhi.

Maran also noted that the Indian government will be setting up an open-source center in Chennai to develop open-source software to get around the high cost of proprietary software, Maran said.

"The response that the HCL PC is getting is phenomenal," said Ravi Pradhan, country manager in India of Via Technologies Inc. in Taipei. At Indian Rupees 9990, the cost of the new Linux PC from HCL breaks the Rupees 10,000 price barrier that is important to attract the mass market, Pradhan added.

HCL's $230 PC uses a processor from Via in Taipei, while Xenitis Infotech Ltd. in Calcutta launched this week a PC priced also at about $230, which runs Linux on a processor from Intel Corp.

In May, Encore Software Ltd. in Bangalore introduced three models of Linux-based computers that retail at between $222 and $333 depending on the configuration.

Microsoft Corp. rolled out in India in June its Windows XP Starter Edition, a low-cost, stripped-down version of Windows XP for emerging economies. But some of Microsoft's partners, like HCL, are of the view that offering Linux is the only way to arrive at the $230 price point.

By using Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition, it was not possible for HCL to offer a PC at $230, said an HCL spokesman. "Linux is free, while the Starter Edition has a price tag to it," he added. HCL also offers PCs that run the Windows XP Starter Edition, as well as Linux PCs that run on Intel processors.

"The Starter Edition has its limitations, such as the hardware configuration that can be used and the number of applications that can be run at one time," said Pradhan. "The competition at the entry level is between Linux and a pirated version of the full version of Microsoft Windows."

By September, Via expects to introduce its Terra PC, a set of reference designs for low-cost PCs, that will first be rolled out in India. HCL is one of the licensees for these reference designs, based on Via's processors and chip sets, that will enable vendors to offer PCs priced at about $230, according to Pradhan.

The PCs will be offered with Linux, although they will be certified to also run Windows, according to Pradhan. By adding the Windows operating system and office suite from Microsoft, the price of the PCs will more than double, he added.

Microsoft expects that product value will, in the final analysis, prevail.

"We are committed to helping India bridge the digital divide, and making our offerings more affordable is a key initiative to this end," said a spokeswoman for Microsoft India. "In creating low cost products, we need to ensure that there is no compromise in the value they offer," she added.

By John Ribeiro
IDG News Service

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.