Wal-Mart Plans To Restock Hot-Selling Linux PCWal-Mart Plans To Restock Hot-Selling Linux PC

Wal-Mart officials said Wednesday that the retailer plans to re-stock a hot selling, Linux-based PC that is currently sold out on its Web site.

The Everex TC2502 Green gPC will again be available at Walmart.com "in the coming weeks," said a spokesman for the company.

Wal-Mart began selling the Everex gPC online for $199 earlier this month, but it's currently listed as "Sold Out". Wal-Mart's spokesman wouldn't disclose precise sales figures, but said the gPC "has been one of the top performing desktop computers on Wal-Mart.com over the last few weeks."

The spokesman said the gPC remains available at a limited number of brick-and-mortar Wal-Mart stores in the U.S.

The gPC is one of the first Linux-based desktop machines to be offered for sale by a major retailer. As such, it could be an indicator of open source software's potential for success in the consumer market.

The gPC comes pre-loaded with the gOS operating system -- a Linux variant -- and a 1.5 GHz processor manufactured by Intel clone maker Via Technologies. The rest of the specs include an 80-Gbyte hard drive and 512 Mbytes of DDR 2 memory.

There's no monitor included, but buyers get stereo speakers and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

As for software, the gPC comes with the free OpenOffice.org 2.2 productivity suite. The suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications, recently won backing from IBM.

Everex is a Taiwanese-based PC maker that's looking to carve a niche for itself as a supplier of low-cost systems. A version of Everex's gPC that runs the basic edition of Microsoft's Windows Vista is on sale at Wal-Mart for $298.