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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."
But... RH 7.1 is a poor distro... Why not 7.2?
Unfortunately, checking their website shows that only business machines will have a Linux option; home machines are still WinXP only.
So much for the claim that Linux is only a toy, not ready for the business environment.
Nope, no sig
I want all the sweets like hot-plug IDE devices (CD, DVD, CD-RW and floppy!), halt to memory and DVD playback.
Until all those are made available out-of-the-box, Linux does not exist for me on laptops (or desktops for that matter). That's why I still use WinME on my laptop. At least that way I can watch my DVDs and swap DVD/CD-RW to a 3.5" drive without resetting the computer.
The owls are not what they seem
The govt has been stepping up ... this is where they should step up. Let the consumer choose the OS they would like.
Don't give me the, they have to because of a license agreement crap. It CAN be done if they choose to. That is why I ALWAYS suggest to a friend to by their computers LOCAL, you can always pick what OS you would like to use.
Only one of the many reasons buying your own custom system from a local vendor makes sense.
Amen!
I have a lot of experience with many of the ranges of HP home and business machines *hint-hint*
Currently the most productive box on my network is a 64mb P200 Vectra running OpenBSD - it serves as router, firewall, SMB server, MP3 streamer and web server - this machine now has as uptime of over 190 days (brought down to add an extra SCSI hard drive and is shoved in a closet. Fantastic hardware quality all round. It has never given me any problems (except for an unsupported AMD Lance NIC - swapped out for a Realtek). This was a surplus machine flogged for $20 from my workplace - best investment i ever made!
As for Pavilions.... *spits*
HP has been selling Linux workstations for a long time now. Their first ones were the Visualize xl and pl, and came with RedHat 6.something preinstalled. Only now they have been replaced with the x**00 series; some more information about them is available here.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I understand your point, but how many casual home users are going choose their operating system? The answer the last casual user gave me when I asked them what operating system they used was, "What is an operating system?"
http://www.askthevoid.com
And i'd like to order Linux. I very much doubt that there'd be too many people accidentally choosing the Linux option.
If anythimg it'll lower the cost of their machines as they get out from the Microsoft tax, making them better options for us system builders.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
I tried buying a Dell Linux machine back in the days when they supposedly supported it. You could only get it on a few models, you were not given the option on their website, and they did not set up machines for dual boot. It wasn't much of a surprise that they didn't sell that many of them.
Why do you require a 'major vendor'? PC's are built with generic parts, and lots of local shops will put one together for you for little more than the cost of those parts.
Frye's also sells 'bare' systems.
In my opinion the installation system needs improvement, the documentation and support on software is severely lacking such as helpful, intuitive documentation for the average computer illiterate. OLE is still horid right now and having outside applications in aid of this helps, but does not confront the underlying issue. Gaming support which highly drives the desktop industry is again, amazingly lacking in X. These are all improving in time and eventually we will get there. We are not there yet. As in servers. Nothing can compete with a highly optimized nix box. Any Win box has to deal with an abundance of software layers to go through when dealing with any process where is an nix box cuts straight to the chase.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
I think your point about remote admin is the key one: unix may be too complex for a normal individual to look after, but so is securing your home windows server against network attacks.
But all these home users need to know someone who will remote manage the box. Do we need to start a 'mentor a home PC user' program?
I should point out that I did work in a tier 1 home PC operation, and there is enough of a minority of purchasers who dont know how to use a mouse to kill support margins. These are the people who drive down to walmart and buy a PC, and they and their friends are some of the people that the home vendors target. Linux is too much for them; hey, even WinXP is dangerously complex.
Try SuSe 7.3. I've installed it on a number of systems and it's amazingly slick; far faster than Windows, didn't once ask for a driver disk, doesn't have to reboot, and comes with all the software the average user might need.
The issue of games is the only reason I still have a dual boot. I'm a gaming fan and have a Windows partition because of that, but that's the only thing I still use Windows for.
As for documentation, I find the Windows equivalent to be equally incomprehensible for the computer illiterate. This isn't a problem with Linux but with the documentation itself, as well as the people who write the utilities not having a firm grasp of what the average person is capable of understanding (the Control Panel is well beyond the 'average user', in my experience).
Although if we wait ten years this won't be much of a problem. The next generation seems to have an intuitive grasp of computers that older generations lack. Working with middle school kids I found that the problem with understanding the machines is primarily one of age - my students had no difficulties with Linux whatsoever and preferred to to Windows because they could do so much more with it (sometimes to my dismay).
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
BeOS did it in 2. Apple took BSD core services and rewrote gobs of stuff in relatively no time.
I'll tell you why....NO centralized authority like management to keep things moving. No authority at the top = nothing gets finished properly.
A client needed some work done on a few of their Linux systems. They allow incoming traffic onto their LAN only through their Intel NetStructure VPN appliance. No problem, "send me the client software" I said, and they did. It was for Windows only!
So I undertook some research. Intel bought their NetStructure line from Shiva some time ago. After a few of their (Intel's) chip customers complained long and hard about competitive issues a la pre-packaged devices such as NetStructure, Intel decided to get out of the appliance biz. Then stopped making the NetStructure VPN appliance. They sold it to HP. Here's Intel's announcement and here's HP's announcement. Here's an IT World story about the same thing. They all tell how Intel's NetStructure 31xx VPN Gateway product line will still be available through HP as the HP VPN Server Appliance SA3xxx series. These are basically old Shiva products - hence their use of SST (Shiva Secure Tunnel) tunnels which are AFAIK unique to these products.
Here's the catch: while these server appliances run Linux (I know I saw that somewhere but I can't remember where) they have no Linux client software! Here's Intel's support page (look for their client software support) and HP's support page - don't have the URL handy but I'm sure of it - contains the same information.
The upshot of all this is that in order to work on Linux systems at a remote location from my local PC, I have to pass through a VPN Gateway which also runs Linux, but I have to use Windows on my end for the VPN client. What a crock! I looked into free/Swan but it doesn't do Shiva Secure Tunnels. Until HP gets serious about this one particular product line and gets some Linux client sotware into the picture, I'm steering clear of anything else they may trumpet as part of their "We do Linux" hype.
hmmm.
Until being absorb^H^H^H^H^H^Hbought by Sun, I worked for company doing development exclusively for Solaris. I can asure you that other than core
development and salesturds laptops everything ran
linux.