Wal-Mart Customers: Linux ain't our bag

Wal-Mart hatched a bold campaign to make the computer affordable for John Q. Public by selling a discount brand with nothing but good ol' free Linux installed on it.

But after just four short months the retail giant is pulling the plug on in-store sales of these rock bottom priced $200 Everex gOS Linux machines.

This news does not shock me one bit, as I had the privilege of seeing one such rejection first hand.

When my mother's computer finally died after nearly 5 years under the strain of never seeing an air duster, I got the call to find an affordable replacement. As a part-time Linux user myself, I figured it'd be easy to teach my mother to accomplish what she needed to do with the computer under the Linux OS.

In theory, I would have been able to. But the operating system that comes with the system, "gOS", is a cumbersome and ugly looking monster that teases you with an "easy-to-use" quick-launch bar for items such as "YouTube" or "GMail" but the system immediately bites you when you start customizing things such as the display resolution.

In my opinion this operating system was not well thought through. For example, if you click on the YouTube quick launch icon, it takes you to the YouTube website, but none of the videos will play since the system does not come with the Flash Player plug-in for the Firefox browser. And for any of you who have played with Linux, installing the Flash Player plug-in for Firefox varies from Linux distribution to distribution. It was no cake walk on this "gOS" system, that's for sure. Any average computer user would not have gone through the trouble.

If you adjusted the screen resolution, this "quick launch" bar did not adjust properly to your new resolution. What an eye sore.

Problems like this are inexcusable. Didn't someone sit down and put the operating system through its paces before selling this model to customers? This had all the makings of a "rush to market" product and the fact that it took as long as four months to figure this out makes me scratch my head.

The Linux OS is absolutely free but comes with an intimidating learning curve to life-long Windows users. When Ubuntu's distribution of Linux hit the Internet, that curve has rapidly started to deteriorate. Since Ubuntu, the hardest part of the learning curve for Windows users is the installation process, as any hiccups between Linux and your hardware can be difficult to solve for a beginning Linux user.

If a company was to craft a computer with 100% Ubuntu compatible hardware and strike a deal for commercial use of their distribution on their computers, then you'd have a real rock-bottom priced computing solution that people could sink their teeth into. Include a DVD instruction video on how to run many common Windows program via the included Windows Emulator (WINE) and it'd be absolute dynamite.

Here's where Wal-Mart could see success in selling these PCs while reaching out to the community at the same time. If they were to donate 15-20 of these new Ubuntu PCs to a local continuing education center in exchange for being able to use the classroom for one or two nights a week over the course of one or two years, Wal-Mart could offer beginning computer classes to the community and get folks trained on the basics of the Ubuntu system. Finding instructors for such a class is easy and inexpensive (I used to teach basic computer classes at local continuing education centers myself).

After a solid crash course in Ubuntu computing, what are many people going to want to do with all this new found computer knowledge? Use it, of course. And for $200 they can take home a computer of their very own from Wal-Mart. Class participants will either love the price or simply feel obligated to buy a system from Wal-Mart since they offered the class for free.

If you don't think that model of business works, try asking Baby Tenda how crib sales were after their "safety seminars" they invited parents to.

After seeing success in one market it becomes a case of "rinse and repeat" across the country. Before you know it, "Wal-Mart computer seminars" could become a household concept.

So when your elderly mother is running 4 desktops, checking e-mail, instant messaging and surfing the web all at once on a $200 value computer she got after a computer seminar from Wal-Mart, you can thank me (or hate me depending on how much you like prying e-mail and IMs from your mother) and hopefully by then I've got my feet up on a desk somewhere warm and living off of good Wal-Mart money.

I can dream, can't I?

Kicking the Warcrack habit; Back to Ubuntu

I hadn't booted my Ubuntu partition in a couple of months, so after a sleepless night this morning seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so.

I stopped using Ubuntu for a foolish reason: World of Warcraft was consuming a horrendous amount of my time and I couldn't get it to run properly in Linux.

That's right, I said it. I was addicted to World of Warcraft. It has stolen over three months of my recent life and I let it. I fell into a terrible funk at the end of October and Warcraft came along and fed on my vulnerability.

Every day for the last three months I have faithfully logged into my account, slayed monsters and fought in battlegrounds all in a futile attempt to elevate myself above "noob" status. What do I have to show for it? One lost friendship, ten extra pounds and a hefty feeling of regret.

I woke up yesterday and finally realized for myself that my Warcrack habit was stupid. Halle-freakin-lujah. Just wish I would have woke up to that fact at least two days earlier so I didn't have to shell out another $15. Better late then never.

I am a fantastic procrastinator. Some of my best work has been done in the waning moments of a deadline. It's so much easier to play a couple more rounds of Freecell than to stop and brainstorm or pick up the phone and make that first dreaded call of the day. To combat my natural tendency to slack, I installed a Ubuntu partition on my hard drive.

Ubuntu is so business-like. Fewer games available to play and free productivity applications around every corner. When I boot up my computer to that plain brown wallpaper I actually want to get things done.

So I have affirmations for myself now that I'm freed from the clutches of Azeroth. I'm going to start wearing my bluetooth ear piece and take calls. I'm going to read my e-mail, and better yet, I will respond in a timely manner. I will use Instant Messaging again.

I will pull my eBay box out of my closet and start selling my junk again for bar money.

I will write every day. I will engage in conversation on current events. I will read blogs and comment on thought provoking entries.

I will reconnect with friends and family I have neglected over these past few months.

I will be Michael Beck once again.

Now it's your turn: What's an addiction or habit that you've had to kick and how did you kick it?