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Tweaking Everex's $199 TC2502 Green PC and gOS

By Pamela Jones et al.

First, I want to tell you how impressed I was by your work on the InterSystems prior art request. You guys are scary awesome. InterSystems also left a comment of thanks. I saw Peter Salus left a comment about the ArpaNet, and here's the Table of Contents of his book about it, which they can get at Amazon, or you can too. He points out, "The original call required a heterogeneous set of sites (1968). The four original sites (Dec. 1969) connected a Sigma 7 (UCLA), and SDS 940 (SRI), an IBM 360 (UCSB), and a PDP 10 (Utah). The source materials have just been published (ISBN 978-1-57398-000-5) and can be ordered from Amazon."

I guess it really hit me this time that we've stumbled on to a new way to really make a difference at Groklaw. Putting so many knowledgeable geek brainiacs in one place and letting them all work together... it's powerful. So thank you very much for your help on that and on the Peer to Patent project also. I know we can't single-handedly change the entire patent system. We are merely human, after all. But we can help those struggling with it as opportunities present themselves.

But today is Saturday. Time for some fun.

A Groklaw member, George De Bruin, has been playing with his new $199 Everex TC2502 Green PC (which I notice Wal-mart now advertizes saying that you can "step up" to more memory and Windows Vista Basic, but I'll try not to hold it against them), and he's written a review for us. I enjoyed it a lot and I hope you do too. I know the Everex Green PC with gOS is designed for those who are not geeks. And our reviewer is hardly in that category, being a Unix and Linux sysadmin, so he can't realistically run it the way a normal user would what he does do is differentiate between what a normal user would likely do and what he did instead. I thought it was very useful. He couldn't resist a little tweak here and there, which led to more, and by the end, he made me want to buy one just to have the fun he's having.

Of course, like most of us, he knows exactly what he likes and wants in computers and software and themes, so some of his preferences might not be yours. Some folks really love Enlightenment, for example. What the review shows more than anything is that no matter what kind of GNU/Linux software various vendors put on a computer, or how they set it up for you, because it's FOSS, there is nothing holding you back from making it be the way you really want it to be, and when you put that together with the Everex price, now you are cooking with gas. As he says at the end, with a few caveats, it's a very attractive low-power-using machine at an amazing price. And if you bought an Everex and are experiencing any of the issues he writes about, or just want to tweak it too, you may benefit from trying some of his fixes. Note that he lists where you can find all the software he writes about. It's in the references section at the end. Enjoy.

Full post as published by Groklaw on January 12, 2008 (boomark / email).