Sooner or later one of the Big Four (Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM) will market Linux to end users in a big way. In the meantime, of course, that leaves a huge opening for smaller companies with bigger plans. For the last year Lindows.com has been pushing hard into this space. Now comes Linare Corporation <linare.com>, a three-year-old Seattle area company. In September Linare announced Linare Linux Desktop OS, which it sells for $19.95, in advance of a planned rollout of a "high-quality, powerful, and fully loaded desktop PC for US$199.95".
Linare's distro is based on Red Hat and KDE and bundles Open Office, the GAIM Instant messenger, Mozilla browser and mail software, games, and lots of multimedia software, including RealPlayer.
Linare CEO Soma Sundaram said the company studied the market carefully and decided that the reason desktop Linux hadn't taken off was "lack of support from the OEM side." He also said recent rounds of viruses designed to attack Windows systems created more demand for Linux, which he called "a virus-free operating system". So he decided "to take a different approach in terms of hardware and software. Anybody can install the Linare OS on any hardware today; but in the long run its best to provide unique hardware as well".
The company will market its new products primarily to end users, and support the effort with national television advertising.
- Doc Searls
Notes (not for publication)...
directly. primarily lookihjg for home and business users, high end users.
business model is different. manufacturing our own hardware. lots of distros. main problem cloes aat the oem side of it. bundle software, loweer cost drastically.
based on red hat
modified the UI to be more user friendly , based on KDE, familiar windows-like, comes with open office and the real player, and a pdf viewer.
GAIN,
tons of games on it.
primarily a very simple UI. simplified the menu structure. Video clipping.
integrator of software and hardware. primarily a software company . gettin g into HW because analysis on distros. lack of support from the oem side. took a different approach in terms of sw and hw. anybody can install. it in anything. but decided to go with the hw as well. need some uniqueness there. pushing the
$199 pcs. manufacture in asia. some kind of custom built at some point. customized, manufacturing here.
going out to the end-users. get to the bottom of this, rather than fighting the middle man.
it weill be available on-line as well as over the phone. amazon as an online retailer.
nationwide TV ads, 30 second commercial and 30 minute informational.
the real problem for the end user, the consumer and business user, is that they
vve all heard about it, but they don't inow how easy it can be to use. Put int in the tv, let them watch. Right now the main problem is that lots of apps are not running on linux.
our business model is going to be entirely different. but oconfident that it will be a good ting for the open source community.
we are primarily doing business here since 2000 in the softrware services sector. decided to do software. background in product development. decided linux is a hot market, and the future will be in linux. and maybe it's the right time to jump on.
very good response in terms of hardware bundled with software. only concern is about running apps. one of the banks is very keen on getting the desktop. expect to see the banking sector adopt linux desktops. everything there is internet based. because linux is so adapted to the internet.
it's all customer driven.
the virus issue has become tortally unmanageable (me)
it's a virus free operating system, a major plus point right now. in fact, even today, microsoft announced that more virus issues are coming up.
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