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HP Selling Systems With Linux
jeffy124 writes: "We were all very upset last August when Dell discontinued selling Linux on their machines. Good news - HP's picking up the slack. They're shipping machines pre-installed with Red Hat 7.1. Unfortunately, checking their website shows that only business machines will have a Linux option; home machines are still WinXP only."
Dell is still installing Redhat on its servers/workstations.
here is a link.
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
The reason that they are shipping a year old system is that that is what they tested with. They confirmed that their hardware will all function fine under that version of Linux. They must have fully tested and configured all aspects of the machine to be confident that what they are selling will work with the minimal amount of fuss.
Since they may have spent six months or more testing, tweaking and then retesting, that is what they will ship. The testing cycle of any new product takes time and care. Simply slapping it together and seeing that is "mostly" works is just not good enough to put your name on something.
HP is probably beginning to test or are nearing completion of testing Red Hat 7.2 on their systems. In another 6 months or so, they will probably have those systems ready to ship.
That is the way that business operates. You will understand when, or if, you get into a position with a company that is looking at updating systems. Knowing that something "works" is not the same as knowing that it works by testing the heck out of it.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Maybe more than $100. Just try to find a PC from one of the big OEMs that doesn't bundle some MS application software, either Office or Works Suite, with Windows. The OEM XP Home I got on my new machine (Hey! I have to have some system to play games and do my taxes.) was $99, although that was from PC Club rather than one of the top 10 vendors. Add in Works Suite and you're talking more like $150; Office would bump that to quite a bit more.
And don't underestimate $100 savings, either. Some cheap machines these days are retailing in the $500 range, so knocking $100 of the price is a relatively large chunk of the cost. Those may not be hot gaming machines, but they might be pretty decent for mundane office use.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
HP was gracious enough to loan me one of these machines for a couple of weeks; so that I could write a review of it. I've only had it for a day, but it appears to be everything that one could ask for in a Linux graphics workstation. It's incredibly fast, has unbelieveable graphics, and has a customized RedHat configuration that just works.
HP has seen the light, too, and is running XFree86 instead of the custom Xserver inherited from their HPUX platforms. Their first Linux boxes, released about a year ago, weren't running XFree, IIRC.
More to follow, of course. One line summary -- The machines are real, and they rock.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
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I think I'll get the windows version and install debian myself.
Alas, it won't be so. The so called Microsoft Tax amounts to about $100. I was a technical support supervisor for one of the major PC manufacturers, so I had some involvment in cost analysis of the PC's we sold. Our licensing costs on the OS was between $35 and $45 (depending on the version) and Office ran about $45. Why so cheap? Obviously volume plays a significant role, but also Microsoft had no involvment in the manufacturing of the media. We received a "master" set of discs that were in turn shipped to our manufacturer who then made the media that we shipped. Microsoft incurred no costs outside of development.
Another reason that you probably won't see "clean" systems is that most computer manufacturers are seeking to reduce the number of configurations available in order to reduce the cost of building the systems. Before I left my job in the PC manufacturing industry, my company had an exraordinarily broad catalog with substantial overlap between home and business systems, as well as a number of configurations that were rarely selected. That variety costs money...and also leads to mistakes, such as an overly ambitious salesperson who happily bundles a DVD drive, CD drive and CD-RW drive into a desktop system that has two 5.25" bays. But I digress...
The number of systems that customers would order blank is vanishingly small as a percentage of total sales. My company would do it, but only for their "key" customers, organizations that ordered systems by the hundreds. Otherwise, it just wasn't worth it, particularly with the razor-thin margins in the business.
I guess one way of looking at it is that because of the rapacious competition in the industry we're paying extraordinarily low prices for computers today. Sure, the extra $80-$90 that you pay for the OS and application software seems unfair, but on the other hand, the total system price is, quite frankly, a bargain, even with the inclusion of the unwanted OS.
My suggestion (and I'm sure there's no shortage of those similar to it) is that if you want a system with a clean drive, you should build it yourself.
-h-