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IBM Dropping Laptop Linux Support
Bjarne Bula writes "In a message to the linux-thinkpad mailing list, Keith Frechette, former (as of Monday, June 24th) lead developer of Linux support on ThinkPads,
reported that IBM has decided to no longer fund that project." I've been using
Linux on a ThinkPad for some time now. If it stops being compatible, my next
laptop won't be a ThinkPad. Too bad, because the machines are solid. Update: In an interesting counter-point, Information Week tells us that IBM will be opening a manhattan based "Linux Center of Competence" to show off Linux. Go figure.
IBM are a bunch of graffiti spraying vandals anyway.
"Linux is our flagship technology going forward! Quick, let's cancel it on our sexiest products!"
What a great way to torpedo enthusiasm in the techie community... :-p
Time for someone to set up a petition page...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
An older article here has the developers of their open source devision saying...
o p
People don't buy many small computers just because they will run Linux (the geek population just isn't that large). People do, however, blow large chunks of cash on big machines just to run Linux. Mom-and-Pop can almost always undercut IBM on prices for small machines, and geeks are thrifty. You don't have to sell many million dollar machines to justify being involved in Linux development.
IBM Kernel Hackers:
All of the people in our group and most in the LTC have Thinkpads for their daily development and run Linux on them (I'm writing this on one as I sit in my apartment). There may not be as much corporate support there as you want, but there is plenty of grass-roots support. We had to learn all the quirks to get Linux installed and get all of the little things working (just like you). I've always wished that we shared more of this information, but there are usually people who are farther ahead than we are. I've uploaded the meager information that we put together during a meeting once. If you're curious, take a look: http://www.sr71.net/slashdot/thinkpad/linux-deskt
Why dont they just start working on Linux for Laptops?
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
IBM also said it was going to include Generic Unix support rather than Linux only (scroll down). This means, they are embracing the entire spectrum of free Unix OS's instead of just Linux (Which IS A BONUS). They would be supporting OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, OpenCLT, WindRiver RT, OpenDOS, Linux (no distro specific). Frankly, it was weird seeing IBM saying they only support RedHat Linux (Linux is Linux whatever distro runs it, and at hardware level this shouldn't have mattered, AFAIK most IBM use was at hardware level). This IS A GOOD THING.
It seems to me that IBM is looking at Linux as an operating system that belongs on server grade hardware and beyond, not on desktops or laptops. There probably are not enough people using Linux on their laptops to justify the time spent supporting it.
They used to have Thinkpads that ran AIX. Some of the SysAdmins I know at IBM used to prefer them for on-site troubleshooting at the server farms since it was UNIX end-to-end (to the extent that AIX is UNIX anyways). But someone decided that it was not worth having the product line and they were scrapped.
Too bad, but this sounds like more of the same...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
...they don't stop giving out hardware documentation, I can't see any real problem here - most other company's don't found Linux development either and people still buy their hardware...
"If it stops being compatible, my next laptop won't be a ThinkPad. Too bad, because the machines are solid. "
I dunno if that's the attitude I'd have. The reason you buy a Laptop from IBM is their manufacturing compatibility and support. (support meaning they'll replace a defective component...)
If there's an icompatibility with Linux and one of these Laptops, then people should rush to fix it. The reason I'm saying this is that corps who buy these laptops aren't going to be worried about Linux until they really really need it. It'd be a lot easier for everybody if the information on how to make Linux work on an incompatible laptop were easy to find for the non-Linux initiated.
I'd have been a Linux user 6 months ago if I could have gotten it to work on my laptop. Unfortunately, I couldn't find what I needed to fix it, so it got Windows 2000 instead. It'll be a while before I have the free time to pursue that again.
I'm thinking of the Linux community as a whole, here. I can understand somebody saying "This laptop won't do me any good if it doesn't wrong what I need", hell I'd have the same attitude. I'm just thinking that if everybody says that, then this will always be a Microsoft world.
"Derp de derp."
Good business sense, at that.
As displeasing as it might be to the faithfull, it dosent make much sense bottom-line to invest a lot of money in this area. It dosent nessesarily mean that Thinkpads will become horrors of proprietory that will become useless for Linux, it just means spending less money supporting a free OS that honestly manages to support itself well enough anyway. (The Linux work isnt adding value to IBM laptops for the average punter, to the point where they will decide on a Thinkpad over an Inspiron.)
Then there is the fact that IBM may cash-cow their x86 laptop business anyway in preparation to sell it off, rather like their hard disk business.
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.-John von Neumann
IBM designs their laptops and either makes them or has someone else make them to their design. So somebody probably got the bright idea to just buy random Taiwan made laptops and slap an IBM logo on them - they think that this will reduce costs and increase competitiveness with new designs intoduced monthly.
The only have to look at thir Aptiva line of desktops to see where this stratigy will go - their good name will carry a few customers for a while, but in the end, nobody will pay a premium IBM price for a non-IBM product with an IBM sticker slaped on the front.
Well to be fair, it look lie IBM did design the plastic bezel for the Aptivas.
What does this have to do with Linux? We'll getting Linux to run of crappy hardware with Win-Modems and no name audio chips is a pain in the butt - if IBM was to suppot Linux, assuming they are going where I think they are going, they would have to pay a lot of money to get it done right.
Eithr that or the Microsoft OEM contract is up for review.....
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
The Linux community right now doesn't really need a whole lot of support. If IBM would use hardware that already has decent and proven drivers in their laptops then there isn't too much to complain about, you can install Linux and be happy.
Now of course if they make you buy it in the beginning with Windoze then we have some reason to complain.
The Anti-Blog
It's not the ssh terminal opening up on OSX that does it. Heck, you could probably ssh from DOS.
/usr/bin :-)
It's ssh'ing TO the iBook and doing an
ls
that brings a smile to my face!!!
Whether or not it makes sense depends on how much return for the investment it generates. It's still a tight economy and throwing a couple million at developers and support technicians for a product that doesn't support itself financially is probably not a good idea just yet.
On the other hand, corporations will shell out the big bucks for support just to have the reassurance that if their system starts pushing up daisies, then someone else will be as miserable as they are.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Okay so IBM doesn't have enough money to fund creating drivers for Linux for Thinkpads. Fair enough since resources are finite. However isn't one of the best features of Open Source projects is to get people who are interested in contributing to the project?
Why does IBM need to hard dedicate manpower to Thinkpad driver writing? IBM can just provide open hardware specs(assuming they don't violate some NDA from inside or 3rd parties), a little TLC and feedback from a maintained ML, and let people who are modivated to get stuff working do their thing. Heck even IBM can maintain the CVS repositories if they want.
The point is that although it would be handy to have IBM leading driver development for Thinkpads or whatever hardware, it isn't exactly necessary. IBM can just as easily, and for a lot less bucks, forster a community that will help support them and themselves.
Most of the stuff that was "special" about laptops has been standardized, including power management (APM and ACPI) internal peripherals (mini-pci).
The biggest thing now is to keep in mind which video and audio chipsets are going to be compatible, which is easier to do in the design stage than the support stage later on.
I love my T series thinkpad, and as long as future designs take those chipset issues into consideration, then I'll stick with the thinkpad for a long, long time.
In this day and age of cost-cutting it really isn't a suprise. Only geeks (like those found here) are going to use *nix on a laptop anyway and most of us can handle our own installs and tweaking.
The only place I can see this biting IBM in the @ss is in the case of Europe where we have France giving a major contract out to Mandrake and the stories about Linux PCs selling in Scandinavia. Even though Walmart is going to start selling Linux loaded PCs soon. Despite the Walmart decision, I don't think we'll have the same enthusiasm (as we're seeing in Europe) in the US for a while.
Hope I'm wrong... Either way, unless these kinds of efforts continue to grow, IBM probably made a good BUSINESS decision, even though I (we?) may not like it.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
I think to some people since IBM was one of the first mega-corporations to embrace Linux, this announcement about cutting support for Linux on the laptops comes as a suprise. However, where is it that IBM has made all of its Linux progress? They've made their progress in the enterprise on big ass IBM servers running Linux. However, the desktop/laptop space is very different from enterprise servers. The margins appear to be much thinner on those machines and so I'm sure that business unit is trying to cut costs. I doubt they have seen enough traction from Linux on the desktop to justify the cost of support and development. I also think that IBM knows that there will be some unofficial ThinkPad Linux support that is provided by its users.
I got a Thinkpad 600E off eBay earlier this year and put Debian Potato on it. It has been rock solid. I suspend and unsuspend multiple times daily and pretty much never reboot except to play some games in Winderz once every few weeks. And I am one of the fabled "desktop users" whose existence everyone on this site questions, who only runs programs written by other people and couldn't write anything useful in C to save his life.
If IBM's "dropping Linux" means you won't be able to get this kind of performance on future machines, then I will cry. But if it only means you can't buy a Thinkpad pre-loaded with Red Hat, I ask, what Linux user would want someone else to choose a distro for him (or her) and install it instead of being able to configure his/her own OS from the ground up? In short, does IBM's announcement really matter in any sense but the symbolic?
I'd be happy if IBM officially supported linux on laptops, but I've bought laptops before from other vendors that weren't officially supported linux and have had little trouble. It just takes some up front research to figure out what's going to work and what won't.
;)
Now, IBM may be cutting official support, but it's reasonable to believe that IBM will continue to support community efforts. That is, they'll probably be helpful in making the information about their laptops available to the kernel hackers out there so that they can be made compatible. This way, IBM spends very little, and you can still get an IBM laptop running Linux, it just means there won't be some guy at IBM you can call and ask questions.
No big deal, I never used to do that even when I ran Windows
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
IBM also said it was going to include Generic Unix support rather than Linux only (scroll down).
/. story made no reference whatsoever to this. The first is just a link to the thinkpad mailing lists, while the second is an email sent to the lists by the IBM lead developer who was laid off.
... I suspect as the migration away from Microsoft picks up steam one or more of IBM's competitors will step up to the plate. In the meantime its back to getting everything working ourselves, something we Free Software users have always been pretty good at.
Do you have a reference to back this up? Both articles on the
I see absolutely no indication, anywhere, that IBM plans on continuing any sort of non-Windoze support of their T-series thinkpads, which is a shame as my company alone bought 4 of them specifically to run GNU/Linux (we are, after all, a GNU/Linux shop). Aside from individual sales they will loose with this rather short-sighted and foolish policy, they are likely to loose a number of corporate customers who are migrating away from Windows because of BSA-Licensing nonsense and don't want Microsoft licenses or software anywhere on their premesis. And if you were to foolishly think we are unique in that desire, you would be sorely mistaken.
IBM was uniquely positioned to take advantage of the ever-growing number of companies moving away from Microsoft because of their ever-more-draconian licensing terms, fees, and enforcement, as the ability to run the target operating system (likely GNU/Linux) on their laptops is an important part of such a migration.
This is a profoundly unstrategic move for IBM to make, and I suspect has a great deal more to do with bulk OEM licensing of Microsoft's monopoly operating system for installation on their hardware than it does with their desire (or lack thereof) to support GNU/Linux. Especially with the DOJ making it clear that they have no intention of enforcing anti-trust law against Microsoft in any meaningful way, IBM may well have felt they had no choice if they were to avoid paying twice what everyone else is for the privelege of reselling Microsoft's shoddy products.
Oh well, there are plenty of other laptop manufactuerers out there
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
To be blunt, why should IBM lay out the serious cash required to support linux on laptops when the only people who give a damn run linux on their laptops anyway and never use the support? It's basic economimcs. IBM probably sells a couple thousand thinkpads with Linux a year. Those sales probably cost them 20x as much to support as they make. If the product loses money, axe it.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
When IBM first announced their big Linux initiative, I asked some of my IBM friends about the thinking behind it. They claimed that one advantage that drew IBM to Linux in the first place was the notion that IBM could use the same OS on everything from big iron to desktops to laptops to PDAs. In other words, IBM could focus on just the hardware and yet still have a common software solution that works across any product they might come up with. (What other OS can scale from mainframes to handhelds?) I conjecture that IBM has now forgotten the original rationale and is now focusing just on those areas that are most successful.
This is the ultimate fate of any Really Good Idea in any large organization: eventually, the rationale is forgotten and the focus switches to near-term success. This is probably a good thing.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
I still don't understand why everyone here bitches and moans whenever a hardware vendor drops Linux from their lineup on certain items. Linux is not and will not (atleast anytime soon) be the choice of the road wariors who buy laptops by the truck loads. Its really quite easy to see that certain operating systems are better for some tasks than others, Linux is not ready for desktop market.
Step back and look at it before writing this off as a troll. You're a geek, you're one of the few. Most people who buy laptops buy them because they're on the move, running between business meetings and such. They've not got the time to deal with learning Linux or other OSS OSes.
Stick to what you do best, keep those servers churning while letting the desktop slip; its not your strong market.
scott
QLITech has some very nice laptops that can be preinstalled with a boatload of distros. If you're thinking of getting a laptop you should look at these as well as the "regular suspects".
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Much more interesting to me at the moment is Apple's current desktop grab. I decided several months ago that if I were in the market for a laptop, I'd go for a Powerbook running OSX. Actually I find the Powermac to be a pretty tempting desktop platform too. It's going to be an interesting choice when the next upgrade cycle rolls around.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?