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| Ballmer Asked For a $100 PC and Here It Is: Running GNU/Linux |
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Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 01:04 PM EST
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This is nice. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer asked the industry last month to make a $100 PC for emerging markets, and they did. Except it runs GNU/Linux. Oops. Grin: " . . .Thousand Oaks, California-based SolarPC has managed it with the Linux-based SolarLite. Due for launch in December, SolarLite is a rugged book-sized PC with a Compact Flash drive loaded with software.
"The SolarLite will be based on VIA Technologies Inc long-life chipset technologies and is designed to run on 12-volt power via solar panels, car batteries, or even human-powered generators. The software for the SolarLite is provided by the DSL . . . project, a bootable Live CD Linux distribution.
"SolarPC also announced plans to give away a million SolarLite computers to schools in emerging countries around the world via the Global Education Link project.
You don't have to live in emerging markets countries to drop Microsoft software, of course. The Bristol City Council in the UK is following what I think is a good strategy for easing into it, switching most of their desktops to StarOffice, but keeping Microsoft Office on some: "Bristol City Council has dumped Microsoft Office, Corel Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 from 5,000 user desktops as part of a migration to the open source StarOffice 7.
"The local authority estimates that the move will save it some £1.4m over the next five years."
Wait until they discover OpenOffice. Most departments will switch, but some "1,800 desktops in the city's education service, including schools, will remain on Microsoft Office for the time being." That's because Microsoft offers deals to educational facilities it won't offer to other public sector users. I'm thinking they will soon. They are also keeping a few computers with Windows for those who "need to manage the few documents with specific technical features not yet fully supported in StarOffice." I think this is a fine plan, because it eases the transition greatly to have your familiar old software handy for when you are in a rush and haven't figured out all the ins and outs of the new software yet. It's also how most of us tranfer to GNU/Linux systems, bit by bit. A spokesman for the Bristol City Council says they studied the the technical, financial and cultural issues for three years before deciding to switch to StarOffice. If the world keeps this up, it won't matter what the EU Commission decides or how little the Justice Department does or who sells out for a pile of bills, will it?
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 01:33 PM EST |
s/tranfer/transfer
\Cyp[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Reven on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 01:33 PM EST |
A small correction, though it is in the quoted text, not PJ's article. That is,
StarOffice isn't open source. OpenOffice.Org suite is - StarOffice is the
commercial, closed-source version of OpenOffice.Org.
---
Ex Turbo Modestum[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 01:33 PM EST |
Aha, aha.
I shoot out the lip.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: PolR on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 01:34 PM EST |
| You know the drill [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: archonix on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 01:36 PM EST |
I'm normally very lazy and appreciate links to things. Since there are more
people like me out tghere, here's a link to
SolarPCe.
And here's one to the
Solar Lite.
Interesting little machine by the look of
things.---
disclaimer: I'm human. I make mistakes too, but I try to fix
them if you ask nice.
Graham Dawson - Gentoo Masochist [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: tiger99 on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 01:42 PM EST |
| Come on now, it is 39 days since PJ extended the invitation..... Still nothing!
Surely one of you wants to say something?
Main posts in this thread may only
be made by senior managers or attorneys for
"The SCO Group". Main posts must use
the name and position of the
poster at "The SCO Group". Main posters must post
in their official
capacity at "The SCO Group".
Sub-posts will also be allowed
from non-"The SCO Group" employees or
attorneys. Sub-posts from persons not
connected with "The SCO Group"
must be very polite, address other posters and
the main poster with the
honorific "Mr." or "Mrs." or "Ms.", as
appropriate, use
correct surnames, not call names or suggest or imply unethical
or illegal
conduct by "The SCO Group" or its employees or attorneys.
This thread requires
an extremely high standard of conduct and even slightly
marginal posts will be
deleted.
PJ says you must be on your very best behavior.
If you want to
comment on this thread, please post under "OT" [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: CnocNaGortini on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 02:08 PM EST |
There's also the Indian-designed Simputer, running a Linux based system -- on
an Open Hardware design. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 02:37 PM EST |
Wait until they discover OpenOffice.
Even though
OpenOffice.org can be downloaded for free and StarOffice costs money, there may
still be good reasons to buy StarOffice licenses from Sun. Sun can provide
additional technical support. Sun's pricing is probably reasonable and certainly
much less costly than Microsoft Office. Also, going with StarOffice now should
not preclude Bristol City Council from switching to OpenOffice.org in the
future.
"Bristol City Council has dumped Microsoft Office, Corel Word
Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 from 5,000 user desktops as part of a migration to the
open source StarOffice 7.
OpenOffice.org also does not (or not yet?)
have the ability to read and write WordPerfect files, and StarOffice does.
Bristol City Council would probably have a large number of files in WordPerfect
format to which they need continued access. Also, any large organization is
likely to receive WordPerfect files from outside sources from time to time, and
it is useful to be able to read these. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Woad_Warrior on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 02:55 PM EST |
P.J.,
You've been doing the community a great service and favor with your site. So
please step away from your comp, and enjoy the holiday. :-)
We will of course expect you to be back bright and early friday to amaze and
amuse us, and confound SCO and other corporate leeches. ;-)
Thanks for all the hard work by you and the others who have contributed
significant time and resources towards providing the FOSS community upto date
info on the goings on. We'd never get the amount of information from the press
that we get from visiting your site.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: gdeinsta on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 03:02 PM EST |
I ordered the business-card
sized CD with
DSL ("Damn Small
Linux"). It arrived a week ago. I put it in the CD drive and... it booted up
perfectly. It's very impressive to watch it go through all the hardware, poking
and prodding to find out what is out there. (It's based on Knoppix.) The only
thing it got wrong was that it didn't adjust to my two-button mouse, so I have
no way of making a "third button" click. But it got everything else right. Not
bad for a 0.8 release!
I was impressed how much I could run in 64Meg of
RAM, with no hard disk mounted. FluxBox is a perfectly fine desktop
manager, and it supports both KDE and Gnome applications. Dillo is a useable
browser but it doesn't include an ftp client so when you click on an ftp link it
does nothing. You have to manually fire up the command-line ftp
client.
As distributed DSL does not include Firefox or OpenOffice. So
for your average user it is probably not a good choice. But if you have a
small/old machine it is great. On my 466MHz Celeron it can decode and display
video with about 60% CPU usage. When playing music (without video) the CPU
usage barely registers at 1%. According to the DSL website it runs even on a 486
with acceptable performance and it is useable in GUI mode with as little as
32Meg of RAM. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: skip on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 03:17 PM EST |
Students are allowed to download StarOffice free on stating that they are indeed
students. The student version _is_ the commercial version, but comes without
support.
I got it last year, and while to the level I use it there is little noticable
difference between that and OpenOffice, it is noteable that M$ have no such
deal.
In my case, having Star-office is great, because my supervisor uses M$Office,
and I couldn't afford that. The university could supply it, but my precious lab
budget is for other things.
I'd probably have settled for OpenOffice, but the student deal was too good to
miss.
---
The above post is released under the Creative Commons license
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0.
P.J. has permission for commercial use[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 03:39 PM EST |
Sorry to put a bit of a damper on this, but :
Bristol are certainly
going to dump MS Office and use Star
Office on most of their desktops.
However, I believe that
they will run Star Office on Windows. There is no
mention
of Linux in the
Press
Release
Even The Register has got confused and
equates "Star
Office with "Linux",
here,
in the 2nd paragraph.
Perhaps the confusion is because, in the
Windows world, MS
Office is now regarded as "part of the operating system".
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 04:53 PM EST |
Don't tar the whole of the European Commission with the
same brush. Some parts are enthusiastically supporting
FLOSS and trying to get the rest to follow. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 05:18 PM EST |
| Offering huge discounts to everyone who might switch doesn't sound like a
sound long-term business strategy to me. I think they should try it :) [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Boundless on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 06:10 PM EST |
> Ballmer asked the industry last month to make a $100 PC
The problem, of course, is that in this price range,
the Windows operating system is both the most
expensive single component, and the least reliable.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: jim Reiter on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 08:40 PM EST |
Hey Steve,
The $100.00 computer showed up at Fry’s Electronics (one day only) on November
25, 2004
It is a
AMD Sempron
Processor
Internet Ready
Multimedia PC
AMD Sempron XP 2200+
128 MB DDR Memory
40 GB Hard Drive
52x CD-ROM
Motherboard Integrated Graphics
High Speed 10/100 Networking
56 K Modem – USB Ports
Lindows/Linspire 4.5
Limited Quantities on Hand
And Steve it comes with Linux.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: billwww on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 08:54 PM EST |
Fry's (Houston) just had a one-day sale featuring their in-house low end
computer for $99.99. It uses an AMD Sempron 2200+ processor and includes a 40GB
hard drive, 128MB DRAM, CDROM, and on-board video, sound, LAN, modem, and USB
2.0. It comes preloaded with Lindows. No rebates are involved.
Too bad the sale was only for today.
billwww (formerly addicted to high prices)[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: blacklight on Thursday, November 25 2004 @ 10:05 PM EST |
"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer asked the industry last month to make a $100
PC for emerging markets" PJ
This little piece of news tells me that Steve Ballmer does not think that the
problem lies with the pricing of the Microsoft software.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: davcefai on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 01:02 AM EST |
| From personal experience:
switching most of their desktops to StarOffice,
but keeping Microsoft Office on some
1. Some people consider themselves
too important to "downgrade" to StarOffice.
2. Others are self styled "power
users" and could not possibly operate with Staroffice.
In reality most of
the above cannot be bothered to spend a few minutes familiarising themselves
with a new menu structure.
If SO and MSO coexist then there will be problems
because although SO can read MSO docs there will always be formatting issues
which will cause friction.
Personally I prefer to work with Staroffice.
It has never bluescreened or "performed an illegal operation and will be shut
down".
From a cost viewpoint SO costs "pocket money" and you do get good
service from Sun.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 09:34 AM EST |
DSL uses SIAG Office as the defualt but DSL has a Click and Load type thing
going on that allows users to add Open Office with one click and an Internet
Connection.
It also runs Links Hacked (In Graphics Mode) and Dillo as its defualt Browsers.
With that said DSL (Damn Small Linux) is actually a very good ultra lite distro
complete with 2 Web browsers, WP (Pathetic Writer), Spreedsheet (SIAG), XMMS
(Linux version of WInAMP 2), Paint Program (XPaint), and a few more apps by
defualt-It's all rather impresive as it only weighs in at 49 MB!!..It is very
usable as is but is more usable after Firefox (Or Opera) and Xine (MPlayer or
Real Player 10 if you prefer that over Xine) are installed. . [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: rweiler on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 04:48 PM EST |
I've suggested to Jonathan (or maybe Scott) that Sun should buy this company,
but maybe that isn't necessary. However, if Sun/StarOffice/Java desktop are to
have any future, Sun needs to get this product, or one exactly like it, on the
price book ASAP. Heck, there is already excellent synergy with the company
names. :-) The reality is that SolarPC's running Linux and StarOffice powered
from a Solaris (Or Linux) 4 or 8 way Opteron server box would completely gut the
desktop PC market. No viruses, no flaky disks, no fans, no noise, less power
consumption, virtually zero desktop maintanence; if the network is the computer,
than the solarPC is the network endpoint. It sure as heck isn't the SunRay.
Anyway, it would be interesting to know if Jonathan even understands that Sun
needs to have a product like the SolarPC on the price book for JDS to succeed.
---
Sometimes the measured use of force is the only thing that keeps the world from
being ruled by force. -- G. W. Bush
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 06:30 PM EST |
Day After Thanksgiving Sale at Fry's:
"AMD Sempron Processer Internet Ready Multimedia PC
*AMD Sempron XP 2200+
*40GB Hard Drive
*52x CD-ROM
*Motherboard Itnegrated Graphics
*High Speed 10/100 Networking
*56K Modem
*USB Ports
*Lindows/Linspire 4.5
Limited to quantities on hand. No substitutions and no rainchecks on this
item.
Limit 1 per customer."
If you need a cheap Windows license, a local vendor has a minimalist ancient
Pentium-based system for $65 configured with your choice of MS-Windows 98 or
2000. A bit "pricy" but perfect for very-low-end users. Mr. Balmer,
if you want a Windows box for under $100, that's what you get - a piece of
mid-1990s technogy fresh off the scrap heap. On the other hand, you can get
2001 technology running Linux for $100.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: jim Reiter on Saturday, November 27 2004 @ 04:20 PM EST |
........will be designed from the ground up, not assembled
from off the shelve. It might look like the Sinclar or a
small Apple II of years ago, have a mini HD and mini
CD-ROM. It will have a half screen LCD (not necessarily
color) and run off a 12V wall Transformer.
A PDA 600 - 800 Mhz Cpu
A SD slot - floppies are too big.
No multimedia or Doom 3
The promise of large volumes will drive down the prices of
mini HD's and CDROM's.
In America,UK, etc. it will be a child's first computer.
In the 3rd world it will be in the schools and even small
businesses.
It could run gameboy type games and might even come from a
Nitendo type company.
And, sorry microsucks, it will run Linux.
And they will sell millions and millions of them. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 29 2004 @ 11:21 PM EST |
| SolarPC promises a demo of that $100 PC at the 2005 Southern California Linux Expo,
also known nas SCALE 3x If you're
interested in attending SCALE use the promo code GROK for a discounted
registration rate. [ Reply to This | # ]
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