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.