Linux-related storefront?

[Warren Togami]

On Tue, 2001-12-11 at 19:15, Lockhart, Charles wrote:
> 
> I will say this though, I personally would love to find a decent vendor here
> in Hawaii that will support their products even moderately.  I recently had
> to buy a new workstation for, uh, work, and wanted to buy locally.  I
> couldn't even get anybody to respond to my requests for quotes.  I emailed a
> few places what I wanted, never heard from them, finally called them up, "oh
> yeah, we got your email, we'll get back to you when somebody feels like it."
> So now I have a nice new Dell box, runs good, but has a really crappily
> constructed case.  I ordered it, took 1 week to get here.  Still haven't
> heard from the people I requested quotes from.
> 
> -Charles, Voodoo Priest

Memco Systems locally will order parts from any vendor and build a
custom system to your specifications, though you should probably
research the parts yourself because their owner is injustifiably
pro-Intel.  (Nevermind that their Quad Xeon (P3) costs $12,000 and is
slower than a $4,000 Dual Athlon.  Intel is still better!)

Otherwise, if you deal with the right salespeople there that I know,
their prices are very competitive and service excellent.  I bought most
of the cheap Athlon system parts from Memco.  They built a few
pre-loaded Red Hat Linux servers for Honolulu Community College, but
they have no real Linux experience so I would personally ask for a blank
machine and load it yourself.

Joel, please be very careful about this idea.  I personally think it
would be seriously difficult to compete with the established local
vendors in pricing.  Instead you may have far more success by doing
hardware research, and working with an existing vendor in certifying
that their hardware is Linux compatible.  You could then bring them more
customers by giving your guarantee that their custom built systems will
work with Linux, and they would pay you to build and service their Linux
specific machines.  These same customers would probably want on-site
support for their systems, and you would be there too.

Anyway, that's my idea on this matter.  I can look at almost any product
and tell you at a glance if it is supported by Linux.  I was thinking
about informally going through Byteware's inventory and making a
checklist of what works and what doesn't with Linux, but I probably wont
have time to do this in the near future, nor will I be able to offer
them support.