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Wal-Mart, Dell offers help breathe new life into Linux

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Linux

At the beginning of November, Wal-Mart gave shoppers a chance to get an early start on their holiday shopping by offering a $199 desktop computer, both in its stores and online at WalMart.com. As desktop machines go, the Everex TC2502 is not particularly powerful, with a 1.5-gigahertz processor, 512 megabytes of RAM, an 80-gigabyte hard drive and no monitor. But consumers judged it powerful enough -- in less than two weeks, the retailer was out of stock.

Given the price point, the sellout might have been predictable; what makes it remarkable is that the Everex PC does not come with any pre-installed software from Microsoft -- no Word, no Excel, no Internet Explorer, and most importantly, no Windows. Instead it runs on Linux, the open source operating system that has long been viewed as being too geeky for use by everyday people.

The sellout may not be a watershed event: Wal-Mart began the sale with only 10,000 units available in 600 stores (and the machines are in stock again). But the retailing giant's promotion is the second initiative from a major player to offer Linux-based PCs in 2007. In February, Dell conducted an online survey to find out what its customers wanted in future products, and 80,000 respondents said that they wanted the company to offer machines with Linux pre-installed. Dell, which had canceled a previous line of Linux-based PCs due to slow sales, began offering Linux machines again in May.

When the world's largest retailer and the second largest computer maker both offer Linux-based PCs, maybe Linux isn't just for geeks anymore.

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