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A first good feeling about the PC is that it feels "branded" because the manuals and the box it came with have the Linare logos (in contrast with other Walmart OEM PCs). In the box you will find an illustrated printed "map" of what cables go where, a Linare Linux installation manual, the mainboard's manual and a CD with Windows drivers.

The PC comes with a 3-button non-optical PS/2 mouse (no scroll wheel), a PS/2 keyboard (same keyboard as in our previous Wal-Mart review), a pair of powered speakers, and a modem cable (however there was no modem installed on the PC).

The case has space for 4 IDE devices, a power supply that's able to work on alternative voltages, and space for outputing 4 PCI/AGP cards. There is a power button on the front of the case, a reset button, and there is a secret little "door" that has Line Out, Microphone-In and 2 USB 2.0 slots. The size of the case is pretty small, it has the same width and height as my other Walmart PC, but it is about 6 cm smaller in the length. I found the case quite stylish and, in fact, it seems to be pretty silent (comperatively to my other PCs).

The case might have space for 4 PCI slots, but the SiS 740 (7012) micro-atx motherboard only has 2 PCI slots. There is no AGP slot, but there is a "communication" CNR slot. It uses DDR 266 Mhz memory (there are two slots; the machine comes with 128 MB RAM) and integrated SiS networking, graphics and sound chipset (AC97 codec, driver used is the same as with i810). The 100/10 Mbps networking card works great and USB 2.0 as well. The machine comes with an 1.3 GHz AMD Duron (SSE-enabled). There is a parallel port, one serial port, one VGA port, two PS/2 ports, 6 USB 2.0 ports (four on the back, two on the front) and audio jacks for mic, line-in and line out (and another two in front as I mentioned above).

The PC comes with a 30 GB Maxtor drive (mobo supports up to ATA-133) and a 52x no-name CD-ROM. There is no floppy drive installed.

Drawbacks

This is meant to be a Linux machine, so I tried two Linux distributions on this machine, Linare 1.0 and Xandros 2 Business Desktop (review of both these distros are to be expected in the near future). Here is where the biggest problem of the machine lies: As I mentioned above, the machine comes with 256-bit 3D SiS 740 integrated graphics. It supports up to 64 MB of shared memory RAM and it is AGP 4x. Its RamDac is 333 Mhz and supports up to 2048x1536x16bpp NI. So far so good. But there are two drawbacks:

1. The machine comes preconfigured using 32 MB of shared memory for the graphics, pulling down the overall system memory to 96 MB. Linare is Red Hat Linux 9.0+ based, and Red Hat recommends 128 MB as minimum for graphical use. The machine would swap like crazy when using Mozilla, and the fact that Linare has placed the /swap partition at the end of the 30 GB drive instead of the beginning, made things worse (generally, IDE drives are faster in the beginning of their platter). When I later installed Xandros, I placed the /swap in the beginning of the drive and things felt better.

2. I went to the AMiBIOS to setup the shared memory and tell it to only share 8 MB for the graphics card. The SiS driver for XFree86 does not have a DRI counterpart for 3D, which means that no person using Linux with this PC would ever need more than 8 MB (an amount able to give you 1600x1200x24bpp). Using anything more than 8 MB with a non-3D driver would be a waste of memory, not because the non-existance of a DRI driver, but also because using anything above 72 Hz at 1280x1024 the RAMDAC meets its limits and fonts become blurry and graphics quality just goes down the drain. Now, the problem is the AMiBIOS does not allow using less than 16 MB of shared memory! A real waste of memory on a system where system memory is so valuable because it only comes with 128 MB overall.

3. Now, the worst part: Both Xandros and Linare had problems with the XFree86 4.3 SiS 2D driver, for different reasons each:
    a. Linare came pre-configured using the... VESA XFree86 driver. In year 2004, a respectful corporation should not be selling a machine configured with VESA. I must admit that the VESA driver was not particularly slow though. As you can see in the screenshot, the Linare pref panels don't have a listing for the SiS 740 graphics card, however using the stock "sis" xfree driver by editing the /etc/X11/XF86Config file it worked fine.
    b. The Xandros monitor pref panel would only give me 1024x768@60Hz (and it had other unrelated monitor setting panel bugs that will be detailing to my review soon). Changing the settings to the desired resolution and refresh rate (1280x1024x24bpp@85Hz) would hard lock the OS completely. After a reinstallation and some testing, I was able to get it right by hand-editing again the XF86Config file and tell it to only use 16bit above 1024x768 (it seems that the driver doesn't like 24bit on higher resolutions).

Conclusion

Obviously, the SiS XFree86 2D driver is buggy (no specs are available), and different distros fall to bugs because of this. However, if Linare is to sell the machine with SiS graphics cards, they should work on the SiS 2D driver and debug it to work more reliably (the fact that the machine comes with no AGP slot makes this a priority). Additionally, they should get a version of the AmiBIOS for their motherboard that supports sharing 4 and 8 MBs (either that, or they should ship by default with more system memory). A good idea would also be to place the /swap partition at the beginning of the drive.

If Linare fulfilled the above, this machine would an excellent cheap Linux machine to get you started. It might even prove good enough to be used with businesses (it has great connectivity expansion via its 6 USB ports). But not before they fix their graphics-related issues.

Good Points: Silent, adequate speed for the price, stable, compact and small factor case, USB 2.0, affordable - makes it a particularly cute gift.
Bad Points: No modem or combo drive, mediocre X11 2D driver support and no option for sharing less than 16 MB of memory (and consequently, a disandvantage for not having an AGP slot or more memory).

Overall: 7/10