The corporate monolith that everyone loves to hate, Wal-Mart, has announced that they will no longer stock computers that run the Linux operating system on their retail shelves.
While Wal-Mart made a bit of a splash in the tech world when the company announced it would be carrying Linux PCs last summer, it appears the rest of the world failed to notice and Wal-Mart is pulling the plug on its Linux experiment.
After all, it's hard to imagine a world where you would send somebody looking for a PC with a Linux distribution to your friendly neighborhood big box store.
You've got to hand it to Wal-Mart; they gave Linux the old college try, which is more than most PC retailers would do. To the marketing guru's, a PC under $200 has to look like a good sell (Wal-Mart carried the $199 "Green gPC," made by Everex of Taiwan).
However, like PeeWee Herman passed up the gopher snakes again and again during the pet shop fire, people passed up the Linux box for safer, and more palatable, fare (i.e., Windows).
While Wal-Mart will no longer carry the gPC in stores, it will remain available online at walmart.com. So, in the foreseeable future, Linux will have to find somewhere other than Wal-Mart to find its big break.
译文:
沃尔玛将停止在商店里出售Linus内核的机器
大家都特别喜欢的大集团公司沃尔玛，已经宣布他们将不再在零售柜台上出售运行Linux操作系统的计算机。
沃尔玛去年夏天宣布它要代理Linux内核的PC机在科技界掀起了不小的波澜，当时其它行业并没有注意到沃尔玛正在努力的推行它在Linux上的尝试。
我们很少会想像到这样一个世界，在这里你可以让你的朋友到你们社区里服务良好的巨无霸超级市场寻找配置着Linux分支系统的PC机。<0}
在沃尔玛就可以把它实现；他们为Linux做学院式的尝试，这是大部分PC零售商没有做的事情。对于营销顾问来说售价低于200美元的PC机看起来像个有好销路的产品（沃尔玛卖的是由台湾的Everex公司推出的售价199美元的“绿色电脑”）。
然而，就像PeeWee Herman在宠物店火爆期间一次又一次地放弃囊地鼠蛇一样，人们放弃Linux而用更加安全、更容易操作的系统（例如，Windows）。
尽管沃尔玛将不再在商店里出售绿色电脑，但它将继续在沃尔玛网站上进行销售。所以，在不久的将来，Linux将不得不寻找除了沃尔玛以外的大突破口。