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at dell's gigabuys website , there are a few 17 inch panels that are well under two thousand dollars.

They're not the tops of the pops (Viewsonic VP181), but they're pretty damn good, and as low as ~1450USD. Most notable is the DELL 1701 FP for $1449 .

Just use mulitple monitors with that, and I'm sure you'll be happier than if you dropped the same wad for a single VP181. That's the decision I'm making right now.

How is it that Dell has a laptop with 15" 1600 X 1200 resolution (native), but you can't find one for a desktop computer? You'd think whoever builds their screens (Quanta? not sure) would be able to market that tech elsewhere. Of course, I'd like to see that pixel density on a 20" screen...

That's interesting. I ordered and recieved on monday two 2450's both with AMI cards in them. If you don't believe me, just config this 2450 with one of the PERC2DC's (aka AMI MegaRaid) as the secondary controler.

http://www .de ll.com/us/en/hied/topics/products_iis5_pwrap_paw_w in.htm

For Apache

http://www .de ll.com/us/en/hied/topics/products_iis7_pwrap_paw_l in.htm

It's totaly messed up. If looking at the linux page, A 600mhz and 128meg could do 100k-500k hits a day while a 650mhz with twice the ram can only do 20k to 100k!! Someone screwed something up along the way. The header on the questionable table looks like a typo. When comparing the IIS and Apache pages, you'll notice Dell's rating is about the same for the same basic config hardware.

http://www .de ll.com/us/en/hied/topics/products_iis5_pwrap_paw_w in.htm

For Apache

http://www .de ll.com/us/en/hied/topics/products_iis7_pwrap_paw_l in.htm

It's totaly messed up. If looking at the linux page, A 600mhz and 128meg could do 100k-500k hits a day while a 650mhz with twice the ram can only do 20k to 100k!! Someone screwed something up along the way. The header on the questionable table looks like a typo. When comparing the IIS and Apache pages, you'll notice Dell's rating is about the same for the same basic config hardware.

This page on Dell's site might also be of interest.

Bingo. Dell itself reports July 25, 2000 SPECweb99 results. Compare items 2 and 7 to find a common platform score comparison.

(rank, vendor, system, score, #CPU's, OS)

2* DELL PowerEdge 6400/700 4200 4 Red Hat Linux 6.2
7* DELL PowerEdge 6400/700 1598 4 Win 2000 Adv Server

They published the source. If you go here, you should see kernel updates and such, basically anything Dell sent you with the system plus anything new, and you can download the source if you so desire. I did not check to see whether there was a patch for your specific issue, but people's suggestions to check scsi settings seem valid.

Dell never shipped X4XX servers with AMI RAID, though they did with X3XX.

Go to the SPEC web site. Then search for the SPECweb99 results Dell submitted.

Apparently, they are using Redhat's Tux server, not Apache. I don't know whether they are related but the combination kicks IIS's ass. You can't get much more definitive than the manufacturer's own tests using the recognised industry benchmark.

This page on Dell's site might also be of interest.

I'm not sure what you're looking at.

Try this link (same as I posted above).

Select Dimension XPS B Processor

If you can find a place on Dell's site that lets you select a 1.13GHz processor, then please post the link!

I thought I read this two weeks ago... Tom trashed Intel, then contacted Intel to report a possible flaky sample. Inappropriate and hardly objective behavior. It's worth noting that Dell is claiming to offer the 1.13 Ghz systems.

Vote Naked 2000

--

You can find lots of linux hardware here - preconfigured with Linux and with support

There is Linux links on the sidebar in the biz sections, but not in the consumer section.

I wanted to see what dell would charge me for a laptop with linux on it. So i went to their "home/home office" site, and started to configure an Inspiron laptop. I got here when I found the link at the bottom to install Linux on this laptop. You will see that this link is broken. I noticed that about 6 weeks ago. I emailed dell about it, and they don't listen. They still havn't fixed it...

I wanted to see what dell would charge me for a laptop with linux on it. So i went to their "home/home office" site, and started to configure an Inspiron laptop. I got here when I found the link at the bottom to install Linux on this laptop. You will see that this link is broken. I noticed that about 6 weeks ago. I emailed dell about it, and they don't listen. They still havn't fixed it...

Dell needs to put a link to their Linux support page somewhere on their main page. I'd settle for a link at the bottom that says "We also seel systems with Linux preinstalled". I'm looking for a new system anyway, and I am considering buying from Dell, but I need to be able to find the configurations in question.

Yeah, right. "In time for the holidays" in retail means "in the warehouses by September". Intel isn't even shipping 1.0GHz PIII in high volume yet. If you go to Compaq and select a top-of-the-line desktop, they try to sell you a 1GHz AMD Athlon. Dell tries to sell you an 800MHz PIII. Intel is struggling to catch up. That's OK. But instead of pumping 1GHz machines that work out the door in volume at a reasonable price, they're announcing new vaporware machines to confuse customers. That's not OK. IBM used to get into antitrust trouble for that sort of thing.

"Thunderbird" Athlons will be labeled as "Athlon, with enhanced cache", and unless you get one in a pre-built system from a distributor like gateway or dell, the processor will be in socketed form rather than on a slot-A PCB.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.

I hope someone in the oil bid'ness can add to the detail here, but for a while there was an annoying Dell brochure saying how some oil company was using a cluster of Dell machines to crunch data for sea-floor mapping ... now this was at least 18 months ago, but I'm fairly certain it said those machines were running Linux, went into an impressive cost-savings etc.

Lemme see if Dell's terrible search engine yields anything ...
incredible! Try this link about amerada-hess to prove that, if nothing else, Dell never throws anything away. (They *sell* their trash;) )

sw

I thought that there was source here for the drivers. I know that the drivers are there anyway. If you cannot get driver source, you can certainly get kernel source there for the Dell kernels at different versions.

It should be possible to use a diff and find the code that needs to be patched into any other kernel versions to allow the use of your card. Have a nice day!

Just what I always wanted, now when Windows crashes it will take out my stereo too!

My experience with Dell and RedHat Linux was rather distrubing. We purchased a Dell PowerEdge 2400 (with the PERC2/si Raid Card) when recieved the machine it was not preloaded. In fact the raid driver was not finished. They finaly got us the driver after three weeks when to out suprise the driver was compiled for a specific version of the kernel (Dell's Special Tweaked version) which had a PPP problem (which we needed). I guess my point is RedHat and Dell get all sort of publicity for being open sourced, but yet we could not get the source code to compile the driver ourselves. Yet company like Caldera, IBM, and Mandrake get some publicity but it is almost an after thought. This is just my opinion. Peace Out.

If you go here they even offer a special Precision 420 "made" for Red Hat!

If you go here they even offer a special Precision 420 "made" for Red Hat!

About a month ago, I went to www.dell.com/linux/. They had a list of their hardware that was compat, and a link (something like) "click here to configure a computer with Linux" ... which took me to the regular MS-based configurators! I went all over their site, trying to figure out how to buy a preconfigured Linux system without talking to a salesperson, and couldn't. Maybe it was there somewhere, but I didn't see it.

So I ordered from VA Linux, and I'm happy as a pig in shit -- especially since I just configured a Dell as close as I could to my new VALinux, and Dell is a lot more expensive.

(No, I don't work for, nor am I being paid by VALinux for this referral. I'm just a satisfied customer.)

peas,
-Kabloona

My organization recently purchased a Dell Server with Linux preloaded. It came with a Perc 3/Si RAID controller built in. Low and behold, the sendmail people found a flaw in the Linux kernel, and it was the concensus of our network administrators to upgrade the kernel to the latest (presently 2.2.16) from Dell's default (2.2.14-12).

However, Dell only seems to provide their drivers in binary form. This may be our mistake, but others seem to be unable to find source versions as well. Hence, we are unable to upgrade the kernel without risking losing access to our RAID array. This is a frestruation I find other people are griping about on USENET and the like. It seems that some groups have figured out what the hardware is; they just do not know how Dell has it interfaced to everything else.

From the look of this page here there can be quite a significant price difference. I'm not qualified to comment on whether "PE4400 - Highly Scalable Departmental Server" for $11,515 (forth box down) is a better solution that "PowerEdge[tm] 4400 with Red Hat Linux" for $7144, but if I was buying a departmental server it would be my job to find out before I paid all that extra money for the Microsoft solution. As far as I can tell the hardware is equivalent. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Cheers,

Chris Morgan

try here.

Your probably looking in the Home users section. They only have them as large buissness (sp?) workstations. here. Interesting how they seperate them as Mid-sized-desktop/Mini-tower and RedHat Linux. I would presume the RedHat boxes come as Mid-sized-desktops/Mini-towers.

Also funny how the price difference is 800USD...

Mark Duell

Dell sells linux laptops too! As well as desktops, workstations, servers, etc.

Just look HERE.

It's a shotgun approach to R&D without the overhead. It gets your foot in the door before the company gains enought momentum to be attractive to competitors.

The market won't really care about something like this unless it pays off big, or the business is already operating in the red and doesn't target their investments. Then, it is like saying, "We don't know what to do! Somebody invent something! We're taking out a second mortgage for this! Hurry!"

Well, dell.com is most likely one of those fifty, and they use MSSQL7.

Dell has a funding organization call Dell Ventures specifically intended to fund companies like Transmeta. The fact that they are not funding Transmeta is just more evidence that Dell is nothing more than Intel's sex slave. Dell doesn't do anything that Intel doesn't want them to. I wouldn't even consider Dell a technology company, because they don't do any original research. The fact that Dell sells computers is just a coincidence - they could be selling toasters without needing to hire new people.

However, I have noticed a tendency (prevalent on this forum) for the younger element of society to use computers for destructive purposes. I can imagine kids not doing their homework because they are too busy having a Quake3 deathmatch, dowloading pr0n, trading illegal warez via slashdot's hidden warez forum or attempting to install minority OS's like Linux and Redhat.

So to conclude, it is a finely balanced argument, and I for one could not commit to an opinion one way or another, until there is more evidence available. I am very much sitting on the fence with respect to this one, even though it is tempting to have a knee-jerk reaction.

More information on laptops can be found at Dell's website which is at www.dell.com

thank you

*yawn* I can't speak for gateway, but the last three servers I ordered from Dell came without an OS. It helps if you actually talk to a person.

Oh, also take a look at this. I can get Novell and Red Hat too! (check the OS section.)

Try checking some facts next time.

Suppose you chose to have linux installed. Do they also throw in linux software to play the DVDs????

Geez, didn't any of you guys take economics?

You seem to be arguing that a given reduction in costs to a retailer should result in the same reduction in the price to the consumer. That doesn't really make sense though. What incentive do they have to reduce the costs that way? If the consumer is willing to pay for the product, Dell can charge whatever they wish for it. Especially since they are one of the only major brands that provide Linux laptops -- that's why this is NEWS in the first place. Since the supply of Linux laptops is low, and the demand is presumably high, the retail price should actually be higher than that of a windows laptop, where the supply is quite high, and the demand is lower.

Also here's a link to the Inspiron page at Dell:

http://commerce.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp? order_code=890139&customer_id=04&keycode=6W300

I'll assume good intentions, here, but Dell definitely doesn't quite get it.

Where's the source code?

If Dell wants to be taken seriously on Linux, providing binary-only RPMs of x86 drivers is not the way to do it. Binary-only drivers are a security hazard, they don't benefit from peer review, they're not portable to other CPU architectures that use the chipsets they serve, and they're prone to breakage as the kernel develops. Giving us those, only, isn't even half a loaf. More like 1/10 of one.

If Dell Computer wants to get serious about this, it can start by providing chipset information on its so-called "system specifications" Web pages. Consider, for exmaple, the Inspiron 3500 system specifications page: What's the PCMCIA chipset? What's the sound chipset? What are the chipsets for the optional modem and ethernet cards? Is the CD-ROM a standard ATAPI one, or on a custom interface? Is the floppy drive on a standard floppy port, or is it USB?

And, then, once they really get serious, they can apply their influence to get full programming interface information and sample driver code for those chipsets released to the Linux developer community.

That would be genuine Linux support.

Meanwhile, it would probably be better for Linux users to patronise companies that at least seem to understand the issues, and are trying. Such as IBM with some of its ThinkPad models, for example.

You know, I used to think that too. Until recently, I couldn't find a Dell laptop with Linux on it.

The trick, however, is not to look at their home / home office section, but rather their Small Office section. There you can find the Inspiron 7500 laptop with your choice of Windows or Linux. Only the 7500, and the default price is $3952, but you can knock that down to $3744 by removing those extraneous options like external keyboard and changing the warranty to 3 year next day on site. You can even drop it more by removing the ethernet and modem.

Along these lines, does anyone know a good company that makes well-done Linux laptops? The later VAIO's are good, and VA used to make some fine laptops (I'm only sorry I didn't get one then). Is there anyone else that does them right? Or is there any WinLaptop that out of the box will be nearly fully Linux supported yet has all the standard goodies (15" screen, built-in modem, etc)?

Check out Dell's I7500 sales page to order with RH 6.1 preinstlled

Dell supports linux on numerous bases, including workstations, all servers, most optiplex models, some dimensions, and probably everything else soon enough. check out the somewhat outdated dell linux webpage for more details

Are you kidding me? Not only does Dell's phone support rock, they're online support is even better!!

Here, I found the information for you, and it took me all of about 1 minute.

http://support.dell.com/docs/dt a/4XXLV/00000001.htm

haha

That explains why all the donkeys are so happy in Texas.

A friend in Florida told me the locals call Disney there ''The Rat''.

You're right, they just assemble components, but the case of that new hires LCD, nobody else has it yet. I decided to move to using a notebook as my main machine several months ago, not least because sitting close to a 21" display most of the day every day makes me nervous that the lead they put in CRT glass is not stopping the X-Rays and/or escaping accellerated electrons from eating my DNA. But I used to have 1600x1200 and now I have 1024x768.

Their UK web order tracking has been ''down for routine maintenence'' for a week now. I wonder how long it has to be down before it is extraordinary maintenence.

-Andy

You may want to look at a Dell Powervault as a possible solution. Check out dell's website for details. They are VERY reliable and VERY fast, not to mention Dell has the best support in the industry.

My company has outgrown Quickbooks. In light of that, we have been investigating several Application Service Providers for potential financial service candidacy. The big debate has been to use an ASP for accounting services or purchase a reputable software package, a server to run it on and keep it in-house. The final verdict: the latter, and here's why:

Small to mid-size biz
Several of the ASP's I researched and spoke with advertise that they specialize in solutions for the small to mid-size biz. Dell defines a small to mid-size business as a company with = 10 concurrent users. For a biz that cannot afford a $20,000USD accounting package, I can hardly see how that same biz can swing the cost for an ASP (see below)

Cost
For a 15 install/user-base (their minimum requirement) Corio charges approximately $13,000USD per month for software, hardware, bandwidth and technical support for financial services. PeopleSoft is used as the backend and I do understand that PS isn't exactly $15 shareware from Tucows, but $13K is a lot of money, regardless.

I realize that the Application Service Provider market, as it is defined these days, is a relatively new field of service. However, the cost is excessive, the requirements haven't been as accurate as they appear and all of this causes the people that could benefit the most, to be shut out.

It's an excellent idea, but the market needs more competition. Lower the prices and scale to what you advertise.

Trust me, there are plenty of very very smart people working on things other than the internet. Let's think of most of the really breakthrough internet-related development. The net allows people to buy stuff from vendors -- anybody from a major company (amazon, dell to some guy sitting in his basement. Also there is very available information, as well as slashdot. If somebody is in some country that's getting bombed to hell by the US, they can set up a web server and give accurate(hopefully) accounts of what's really going on that doesn't get filtered through TV. There are various projects for the distribution of software, as well as thigns like distributed.net/seti@home.
I may have missed some things, but most other sites seem to be clones of the above -- ie ppl selling stuff, distributing news, distributing programs. It doesn't take much wit to clone a website.
The development of software (ie the linux distos, BSD's, m$) also takes effort. However it seems to me that for every software engineer there is prolly a hardware engineer working on something else (intel Leadmine, the G4, whatever).
I think that there is also a very large number of people working in science. Every major university has some large portion of it devoted purely to medical research, I think, and those areas are full with very very smart individuals doing their best to cure cancer (I work in such a lab myself) or other diseases.

You can't rechannel energy from one industry to another. I can tell you that because people have different interests, they would be much less productive in a field they are not interested in. So for example if I get my thrills by making programs, I'd be quite less interested in working on a farm trying to grow a giant tomato (no offense to Lisa Simpson) or develop better diesel engines.

The point is that I believe it is a miracle that we have gotten this far already, and besides, would colonies on the moon be really worth it if you couldn't listen to mp3's (or watch DVD in linux) once you got there?

You can purchase dell precision workstations with redhat pre-installed. Also, for large orders, dell offers dellplus, where you can get whatever you want basically, you just have to pay for the customer integration. This includes x86 flavors of unix (linux, *BSD, SCO, Solaris x86, etc...) check th is out. You can ws410's, 610's and 210's and optiplex systems with redhat 6.0 (probably 6.1 real soon)

Do you honestly think Dell does this? How many IP addresses do you think on the 'Net actually map back to a domain name owned by the person browsing on that IP? Count the number of domains with unique contacts and divide by the number of total people that use the Internet. It would not make good business sense to pursue this incredibly small marketing target. I have dealt with Dell several times over the past few years, and visit their web site at least a few times per year. I have never once been contacted by Dell at the address listed in a contact for any of the domains I own.

If Dell has your address (likely purchased from a computer-related list elsewhere, assuming you never gave it to them in the past), they're not going to wait until you browse their site one day before the send you out a mailer.

The two incidents are almost certainly unrelated. Dell sent you a mailout because you either gave them your address or you've given your address to somebody that in turn gave it to Dell. Your web site visit had nothing to do with it.

Contrary to what you seem to think, web sites out there aren't going around automatically track your IP addresses and through some feat of network magic find postal addresses for every person browsing their site just so they can send out mailers. There are much more efficient ways to do marketing.

I'd suggest you take a look at Dell's posted online privacy policy at http://www.dell.com/policy/privacy.htm. If you don't trust them and think they're lying, don't do business with them.

Dell:

http://www.idg.net/crd_ibm_dell_9-126 405.html


http://www.dell.com/linux/press.htm

SGI:

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/3 1/ns-9268.html

IBM:


http://www4.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,416 4,2267514,00.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/990930 -000020.html

Compaq:


http://www.digital.com/inFORM/issues/issue27/ln0 2-linux-story.htm

Intel:

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/3 2/ns-9301.html


http://www.linuxia64.com/

Fujitsu:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/990929 -000017.html

Microsoft:

http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departm ents/nt/bugs.shtml

http://support.micro soft.com/support/kb/articles/Q150/7/34.ASP

http://support.micro soft.com/support/kb/articles/Q194/8/34.ASP

http://support.micro soft.com/support/kb/articles/Q224/7/93.ASP

Other side: HP:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/990920- 000020.html

Funny, Henry Ford's line is almost exactly what came to my mind... I was wandering the Dell site, though (they offer colours two), and it had a bit more frightening twist. Any colour you want so long as it runs Winduhs, aka any choice you want as long as it's not an important one.

I found the "We're thinking university logos" line kind of ironic - possibly even Freudian. I can guess the alleged university of Acadia will be one of the first to jump on that. "Any colour you want, so long as it's blue and red and Mess$oft all over." Blech... Something wrong with the Tremclad Technique?

How is it all this "today's technology" (ya right) has to rely on the tactics from the previous fin-de-siecle?