Beginning this week, consumers can pick up a $199 PC from Walmart.com or 20 Illinois Wal-Mart locations. And though it does not come with a monitor, Wal-Mart offers a cheap $100 solution to that. To achieve the low price of $199, the computers’ manufacturer turned to open-source.

The computers will run on a linux-based operating system known as gOS. gOS is based on the Ubuntu 7.10 linux distribution. The applications on the computer are also all open-source. It should be interesting how this turns out.