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.

Gotta love tech bloggers and so called 'journalists'. There is alot of buzz in tech media this week related to an AP report that claims that Wal-Mart is dropping the Everex Linux PC's.

"About a week ago Wal-Mart began selling a $200 Linux machine running on a 1.5 ghz VIA C7 processor and 512 MB of RAM. While the specs are useless for Vista, it works blazingly fast on Ubuntu with the Enlightenment Window Manager. The machine is now officially sold out of their online warehouses (it may still be available in some stores).

Ok, so I read this article about why the Everex $200 PC being sold at Wal-Mart is a bad deal (fyi, it's also sold at ZaReason).

Reports on the death of the Wal-Mart Linux PC are greatly exaggerated, according to the man selling its operating system.

Desktops starting with Dell have begun being sold with Linux pre-installed, almost all of the new UMPC Eee-like notebooks that are selling in extremely large numbers these days are coming with Linux pre-installed, Everex is pushing Linux desktops through Wal-Mart, and lots of new computers are getting SLED certified or some other form of Linux certification.

Availability: Online - IN STOCK
Comment: after the first 10,000 units sold out in 48 hours, this item is now again in stock. In my view, the low cost hardware is only part of the success, the gOS web and Google friendly operating system and Apps are probably the killer.

Wal-Mart will sell a sub-$300 "back-to-school" PC this fall pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows Vista and OpenOffice.org productivity software. The Everex GC3502 PC, is based on a 1.7GHz Via C7-D processor, and will be available later this year preloaded with Ubuntu Linux.

Demand for Linux systems is such that some retailers are selling out. Last year, for instance, Wal-Mart for a time couldn't fulfill orders for Everex's $199 gPC.