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When the PC arrived, I plugged it and powered it up. It booted ok and I was greeted with a few dialog boxes for configuration (password, etc.). At the time I did not make any notes, and now I can't remember everything that I had to do. It seems like there were 4 or 5 things that had to be done.

But after I logged in all I got was the Lycoris background and a undecorated (no window controls) terminal window with a "noname:~$" command prompt. I tried logging out and back in with the same result. I rebooted the machine, logged in again and still got nothing but a white terminal window in the lower right corner of the screen. The mouse buttons did nothing. There were no icons or anything anywhere to click on.

Well this isn't very good. I wasn't impressed. I was downright dismayed. What would your regular consumer think of this? I would think "This Linux thing SUCKS!!". I would probably just box it up and ship it back!

So I looked in the manual to see what the support deal was. Lycoris only has online support and my experiences to date with online support have been less than optimal. (I've found it's usually a day or two, if you get a responce at all.) But wait... Microtel has an 800 number, maybe I'll just give it a jingle and see how that goes. Will I have to sit in a phone queue for 45 minutes? More than likely. But hey, my time isn't that important ;-)

But no, I got right through to a human. I didn't care for the answer at all. I explained the situation to him and he asked me how old my monitor was. ????What??? (Pause while my brain tries to evaluate this question.) I said "I have no idea". He explained that Linux may not recognize a monitor that was more than two years old. I said it was more than two years old, but I doubted that was the problem, since it has worked fine with several other Linuxes. He persisted that the monitor was the problem. I told him that I got a perfectly fine display to log in and I got a window, it was just that it was a "terminal" window. He insisted that I must try it with a newer monitor, so I gave up and said "Thanks, I'll give it a try" and said goodbye.

I was willing to give him the benefit of a doubt, so I connected it to a completely different monitor, one that has worked fine with every Linux distribution known to man... ok, well, the dozen or two I've tried. Same thing. After logging in, all I got was the same dumb terminal window with the "noname:~$" prompt.

Hmmmm, what to do now? There was a CD included with the machine labeled "Lycoris Rescue CD", I wonder what it does? Perhaps it will fix the problem? I put it in and booted with it. Apparently it was just a Lycoris installation CD. I didn't want to trash the existing installation because I was curious what the problem was. But I was also curious if maybe there was just something wrong with the install. I had another unused hard drive sitting there, so I swapped it into the WalMart PC and tried installing from the "Lycoris Rescue CD".

This was a complete flop. I went through the installation just fine. It wasn't too difficult. It took a while to install all of the packages. Then I was instructed to remove the disk and reboot. I did so and it appeared to be shutting down as I expected. But then it just stopped there, with some pretty colored text on the screen. Was it done? There was no disk activity. Seems kind of weird, just stopping. I would think that it would have turned off the machine, rebooted it, or given me some sort of message about what to do. I waited a couple more minutes, but there was still no activity. I guessed that it must be done, so I rebooted. Nada. Nothing. No operating system found. Nice!

Well this is curious! I wondered if I had gotten too impatient and stopped it before it was ready? So I did the whole install thing all over again. But this time, I let it sit there for 15 minutes after it appeared to be finished. Just in case it was still doing something (although I couldn't imagine what could be taking so long). I waited a few more minutes, still no activity. Reboot. Same deal... nothing. This was an excersize in futility :(

I decided what the hell. Maybe I'll give the Lycoris online support a go. It was late Friday evening by this point, but I might get really lucky and get a response on Monday. So I went to the Lycoris website and dug around a bit before I figured out where I had to go for WalMart / Microtel support. I had to register using the code included with the "Rescue" CD include with the machine. Then I submitted a support request.

A few minutes later I checked my e-mail just to make sure I got a confirmation of my request. Sure enough there was a confirmation and lo and behold immediately following it (no spam e-mail in between) was a RESPONSE. I was astounded! Never before have I gotten online support that fast. Amazing! And on a Friday night no less. (Where would they ever find a geek to work on Friday night? ;-)

And better yet... they had the solution to my problem. They pointed me to instructions on how to delete a file called ".wmrc" and sure enough. I logged in again and I got a normal desktop. Nice! But I was still a bit dismayed. The instructions said that for some unknown reason this ".wmrc" file was put there by a clean install. Maybe it's just me, but I would think maybe somebody would want to look into why this happens.

I played with it a bit after that just to find out how well it worked. There was a flash presentation that explained how to use everything and that was cool. I liked the menu layout and desktop. But overall I have to say that I was not impressed.

I tried to play an audio CD, and it appeared to be playing, but no sound would come out.

Tried to play an MP3 file, and it would start to play when I clicked on the file, but then the XMMS file dialog would pop up and it would stop. If I selected the MP3 file in the XMMS dialog it didn't do anything.

It had Xine installed to play DVD's, even though the machine only came with a CD-ROM drive. I swapped in a DVD-ROM drive, but when I tried to play a DVD it gave me an error that it didn't have some decoder thing installed or something or other.

It had CD burning software installed, even though the CD-ROM drive that came in the machine was not capable of burning a CD. I swapped in a CD burner, but when I tried to burn a CD it complained that it couldn't find "/usr/bin/cdrecord". I checked and "/usr/bin/cdrecord" was there. I don't know what it's problem was.

I tried to listen to my internet radio station but XMMS didn't do anything. No error messages, or anything. It just sat there. I fiddled around a bit, but never got it to do anything.

I plugged in my digital camera and it appeared like something was happening, but then nothing happened. I messed with the "Use Digital Camera" application, but couldn't get it to work.

So, I give Lycoris the thumbs down. In my opinion it was really bad that it didn't work correctly when I took it out of the box. Then most of the stuff (beyond playing CD's and surfing the web) I tried to do didn't work and gave me either no error messages or really cryptic messages. I'm afraid that I have to agree with Consumer Reports on this one.

1. "Introduction"
2. "WalMart.com Lycoris Linux PC"
3. "Lindows OS 4.0"
4. "SuSE Linux 8.2"
5. "Mandrake Linux 9.1"
6. "Red Hat Linux 9, Conclusion"