A laptop - with Linux pre-installed

[Roxoff]

Well, I just found this while browsing ebuyer:

Lappy with Linux pre-installed

Fantastic, I thought; that's pretty cheap (but it's low spec.)

Then I saw where they'd shot themselves in the foot:

You can get this laptop bundled with Microsoft Office OEM version, which will not, of course, run on this platform without additional software such as wine which comes with no guarantees that it'll do the job...

[spencerf]

That's interesting it's good to see some places are at least offering an alternative to windows or no os computers. I just don't get trying to package with Microsoft Office though.

I can't believe more people don't know about openoffice. My sister's computer broke for a while and her boyfriend has a nice computer with windows but he never shelled out the $$$ for microsoft office. So I say hey, you can get openoffice for free, for windows, and this will solve your woes.

Think about how much money a school district spends for office, let alone windows, but let's pretend they still want windows but just don't want to spend 50$ a computer for office (times that by 1000 computers or so.) That district has just saved $50,000. They could hire a new teacher to cut the student to teacher ratio.

Sorry this is off topic but I really think ooffice is great and hope that sites like the one you linked continue to try to office variety just not with a crazy oem packaging scheme .. like .. "Linux Laptop: everything included, IE7, surf the web, WMP, play music and vido, M$ Office, type papers......"*

*These programs require wine (not an emulator) to run and will most likely suck while you could use an open source alternative to these programs we decided to offer this package to trick you...