First impressions of a $200 lindows box: Good

[Joel Hammer]

Well, I got my $199 computer plus taxes and shipping ($224). I paid for
regular mail delivery but somebody took it right to my back door. The
front door is still unreachable due to snow. My wife didn't see who
dropped it off.

It has a Duron 1.1 gh and 95 million bytes of ram. Not the greatest but you
can't beat this price.  The motherboard is a K7 Triton GA-7VKMLS via
KM266/KL266 chipset. This will never be a server, but, it looks like a fine
cheap workstation.

I bought a $159 monitor (Mitsubishi 17 inch), so total cost of under $400.

Works fine. It configured itself for my network, and runs well behind my
firewall and works on the internet. It plays mp3's off my server, and
browses my samba network just fine. All without any effort from me. The
browser is netscape 7.0x, which is fine with me, since I find that netscape
is the most trouble free browser in the linux world. (No need for a flame
war. Can't we just agree to disagree?)

I did have a little trouble with the printer configuration until I
realized I didn't need a driver. Just tell the printer wizard to use a
raw print queue and aim for a queue on your print server that handles
postscript files. It is easy to forget that linux always sends jobs
as postscript.

Sweet.

Now, I may have spend some time getting software from the warehouse,
because aside from the browser, kate (an advanced text editor), and a
few other items, almost no software comes preinstalled, unlike knoppix.

I think the girls might like this one. I may try knoppix on this box,
which would be a much more complete installation than lindows.

Joel