Fry's quietly selling Linux desktops

[littleman]

I went to Fry's this weekend to by some business card CDs they had on sale (10 for $1.90). For those of you not on the west coast, Fry's is a huge computer/electronics store out this way.

Browsing around and dreaming about how nice it would be to have one of those $3k 23 inch viewsonic LCD monitors, I happened about a couple of refurbished computers selling for a couple hundred bucks. Oddly enough they were running ThizLinux [thizlinux.com], a Hong Kong based distribution. Looked to be an English version though.

Perhaps they are following Wallmart's lead?

[marcs]

Quick note on those Walmart machines. I have one and I love it. Just bought another OS free machine elsewhere with the same specs for less, so there are better deals.

That said, when I got the machine, I tried installing RedHat on it and it would simply hang during install.

After a few attempts, I popped a Win98 install CD in it instead (oh, the horror) and the same thing happened. This told me it was not OS related.

Long story short, it took me waaaay too long to realize that the CPU fan jumpercable was not attached. The poor thing was overheating and hung.

Got very close to sending it back before I finally figured out what was going on :)