Does anyone know why Linspire, in particular, has had significant success in getting commercially sold with new computers? I know of two such instances: one, I heard that Walmart sells (or once sold) Linspire-packaged computers; two, I have personally seen that Systemax (on www.tigerdirect.com) sells some custom-made Linux computers with Linspire.
Is there something about Linspire and/or its parent organization that helped it jump out of the internet and into retail stores? I've never heard of any store-bought computers packaged with, say, MEPIS, Ubuntu, or Mandrake (I am randomly citing some of the distros du jour).

Wal-Mart and Sams Club carry computers with Linspire and Xandros preinstalled, Sams CLub even has barebones linux systems that come with a weird distro that is based on Mandrake.

It probably had more to do with the pc manufactures than with Linspire itself. There are many different companies that sell and make computers with Linux preinstalled, each one uses a favorite distro.

Thanks; that made things clearer.

Too bad Walmart and Sam's picked controversial (Linspire) and mediocre (Xandros) distros to offer. Everyone seems to love Ubuntu lately, so they would do better to offer that.

P.S.: if anyone is upset at my calling Xandros mediocre, I'll try to back it up upon request.

why not...go on , show us why...some including myself would like to save on playing with the distro just to see what your on about..(not being nasty, i'm just inquisitive)...

Okay. This could have been because I had a bad burn, but my Xandros was/is (I've tried it more than once) very buggy compared to the others I've tried. Various applications, especially Konqueror, crash frequently. Xandros File Manager is superior to Konqueror, but it's very slow. (BTW, I have the open circulation edition.)

However, to be fair to Xandros, it is the only distro so far that reliably runs my wireless network. That's the only reason I've kept it in the first place. Otherwise, it's not a bad distro, but mediocre.

ok..you had a bad experience...hmmm...must admit that when that happens you have a tendency not to return to that distro...i will help people with redhat and have had some good distro's of redhat...but when 7.3 came along, i had so much trouble and the more i tried to fix it, the worse it got...tried a later one and had the same problem..now refuse to use it for myself...but others tell me its the ducks guts and how good it is...i use distro's based on redhat but dont use that one at all...i wouldnt say there is anything wrong with it tho...just me and redhat dont like each other...so yes can understand, plus some distro's like to be setup a certain way and maybe i'm just not using redhat the right way...but thats just one in a sea of distro's all based on the linux kernel...lmao...

Sorry for the slow comment. I just noticed this thread and wanted to add my belated two cents.

Regarding why Linspire is preinstalled more than other Linux distros, the focus of the company is to market Linspire as a Windows replacement or alternative. The best way to compete with that market is to have it preinstalled on computers with fully compatible hardware so anyone who buys them will be able to run them. Out of the box, Linspire has the best multimedia support of any of the major distributions the last time I looked. Other distros, like SUSE, cripple the multimedia applications to avoid legal problems with people like the MPAA. The founder of the company is a proponent of MP3 file format, so he is generally on the consumer's side regarding being able to play multimedia content. Linspire overcomes licensing problems (for playing encrypted DVDs as an example) by selling software that provides a legitimate license for those special items.

I agree with your assessment of Xandros, newbiesforever. I tried it and used it for two days. It proved very unstable for me as well.

Ability to use a wireless network with Linspire depends (at least to some extent) on the encryption method you use with your wireless network. If you use none (not advisable) or WEP, it should work OK. Linspire currently does not support WPA encryption, which I personally believe is the single largest drawback to this distribution.

Well, at the moment, I am trying to run my network in SimplyMEPIS with no encryption (will worry about it later).