gOS: Everything that shouldn't have gone into the Walmart Linux PC

[NorthBear]

I have been working with gOS for the past week. In a nutshell, it's a bunch of garbage and here's why:

   1. Based on Enlightenment E17, gOS has removed the portions of E17 that make it halfway useful while
       providing a default toolbar that's mostly URLs for the Firefox browser. The E17 menu editor has been
       removed, no easy way to add/remove applications. The Xine media player is provided and it can play
       "encrypted" DVDs, but nobody thought to provide a mixer application for the audio!  

   2. OpenOffice 2.3 is provided, but there's no simple text editor like gedit. And why no calculator on the
       main menu? Looks like xcalc and gcalctool are provided, but hey, why give the user anyway of accessing
       them via the main menu?  

   3. If you click and drag on any of the "shelf" items (toolbar, start menu, etc.) then that item just up and
       disappears from the desktop! There has got to be some sort of locking mechanism to keep shelf items in
       place, but this is a user interface disaster of major proportions!

   4. No calculator and no image viewer. Yes, you can view images with Gimp, but that's an image editing
       program. Why not something a little more simple? With slideshow and "fullscreen" abilities? You know,
       like GQview ....

   5. The default Enlightment file manager is a joke. Other managers (like Thunar) are great, but why should
       anything useful be provided with gOS? Nah ... this is just going to Walmart afterall ...  

   6. A system tray program (trayer) is provided, but none of the applications suppled in the default gOS
       setup load icons into the system tray!

   7. There's no "taskbar". You can see icons for minimized windows, but you can't see what windows are
       currently running. This means you use a main menu option to "sort out" active windows if one covers up
       the window you want to access. A task bar would let you get at covered windows directly. Just a stupid
       user interface to the windows on the desktop. Very primative!

All of this comes on an Ubuntu "live CD" that just a bit too large to go onto a CD, so it's on a DVD ISO image.
Hard disk space isn't an issue. The default install is 2.4GB and even with KDE and other goodies the amount of
disk space doesn't exceed 5GB.

I installed KDE on the "Walmart PC" hardware and it runs great. You've got toolbars that won't disappear, all the
GUIs for setting up things like your mouse and display, even a digital clock. I see no difference in performance
(with 2GB of memory) between KDE and Englightenment. KDE's animations are on a par with what gOS provides,
there's no claims that can be made that gOS is somehow "tuned" to the less hardware of the VIA based Walmart
machine.

I think that gOS came into being just to give Walmart a "branded" Linux OS. The first thing that anyone who
buys one of the Walmart machines should do is install Ubuntu/Kubuntu and have a real desktop environment rather than
that lame gOS piece of junk!  

[PingPing]

NB, I'm curious to know what the graphics chip is and what Xorg video driver is being used by gOS.  Could you please tell what they are?

[NorthBear]

[PingPing]

IIRC the fps on the Nano's Unichrome Pro was around 480fps (with direct rendering) at 1680x1050.
The Pico's Unichrome Pro II gets 830 (with direct rending) at 1680x1050.
My Thinkpad's ATi Radeon Mobility 7500 gives 710fps at 1024x768.
My nVidia GeForce Go 6600 gets 3800fps at 1680x1050.
It kinda puts the Unichrome Pro's performance in perspective

The 'openchrome' xorg driver was recently released.  It's possible it didn't make it into gOS's release so you might want to check the repos or compile it yourself (www.openchrome.org) to get the full features.

[Lord Raiden]

The more you talk about this, the more it sounds like the success of the first linux pc is really kind of a dud in sheep's clothing.  Same with gOS.  If that's the case, it may be a bad thing for Linux, because if they're selling like mad, and unless people are switching the OS after getting it home, this might turn against Linux.  It also goes to show that just because it's a linux pc doesn't mean you should be all half*** about your work.

[WrenchGuy]

I'm tempted to buy a Mac...

[Lord Raiden]

Well, I'm gonna get one anyways because a Mac does have its uses.  But in the long term I'm sticking to Linux and BSD.

[WrenchGuy]

I'm still waiting for better standardization in Linux, and 3D support in BSD.

Mac OS is BSD with 3D and usefull desktop software, so it looks like my best option to escape M$ and its malware issues.

[Moondog]

I present this question to Northbear:  From personal experience, would you recommend the Walmart pc in it's stock configuration to a new, non-pc user or limited experience Windows user?  What brand of modem does it have?  Did you look at it's dialup configuration with regards to ease of setup?  I'm wondering because I figure if someone is going to be tight on money and buy something like this for their first pc, they're probably going to use dialup as their first means to connect to the internet.

[WrenchGuy]

Good questions Moondog...(sorry to go off on a tangent before )

[WrenchGuy]

Bear, did you get one of the actual PC units, or did you get the motherboard and download the OS?

Have you tried PCLOS (or any other distro) on it yet?

[NorthBear]

[RobLinux]

I tried a Via C3 Joshua, for a quiet system and it worked fine, but I did upgrade the box to a cheap Copper Mine Celeron when I found I was using it as a main desktop system.

The trouble with Via has tended to be mobo chipset quirks, and difficulty cooperated with the kernel hackers.  The actual CPUs, whilst may be weak on floating point, were reasonable for the intended usage.  Having run desktop environments on old CPUs, I tend to think RAM size is really more important. My AMD X2 systems is probably spending most of it's time waiting on the disk, so whilst it's very fast, it's not doubling the performance of older boxes linearly to bogomiips.

[Moondog]

I bought an 800mhz C3 w/mobo a few years back.  Tigerdirect had them for $60 with a $50 rebate from the manufacturer (Syntax.)  I have 512mb of pc-100 memory (maybe it was 133?) and it's just a bit sluggish when launching apps.  I was running Suse 8.2 on it until I switched to Ubuntu.

For $10 and some parts I already had sitting around, I had a great file server.

[Crosscourt]

I use many of my older p3 pcs or servers or other uses as they run just fine.

I keep alot of older hardware and jut recycle it to other uses rather than throwing it out and theyve lasted longer than some of my newer systems.
The parts are dirt cheap or many times people give me the parts free or before they are trashed.

[Lord Raiden]

I've always liked the Via C3 and C7 chips.  They may not be the fastest on the market, but at the same time they're hard to stop and you can't easily kill them either.  hehe.  

[Crosscourt]

They perform poorly vs a p3 so I find the Via chips pretty much a waste particularly the ones tied to pc100/133 ram.

Why not use an older pc to do the same thing?

[Lord Raiden]

But they're not designed to go up against a PS3.  That's like comparing apples to oranges.  They're great chips that run well in the embedded and low end market.  Like I said, they may not be the best performers, but they're the most rugged.

[Crosscourt]

If you like slugs Ill agree....

Even a lowly celeron will perform better than Vias cpus and they run very cool and can use passive cooling to keep things quiet but improve performance.

[Lord Raiden]

The Via C3 and C7 fill a niche the PS3 wouldn't work well in, or would generally be overkill.  One of those is file serving, personal serving, print server, etc.  IE, utility tasks.  You don't need a balls to the wall processor to do 80% or more of the tasks that the majority of people need a computer for.  Really, unless you're doing gaming, multimedia production, or you have a big high load server, then something like the Cell processor, the AMD X2 or the Intel Core2 chips work well.  For everything else, there's the Via chips.  

The biggest issue with a lot of people's thinking in PC's these days is that they've been drilled on the overkill mindset.  IE, you've gotta have something that is lightning quick.  I refute that.  The space shuttle is run on 486 chips.  The ISS is run on 400mhz chips.  Your VCR runs on a 200mhz chip.  Your car runs on a 200mhz chip.  Your bank ATM runs on a 200mhz chip.  Your cell phone runs on a 75mhz chip, if that.

The point is, 800mhz - 1.5ghz is plenty for well over 80% of the applications out there.  In some cases it's overkill.  So in that case, the via chips are perfect.  Ruggedness + the right amount of speed = A win.