Robin's Report From LWCE

For everyone who can't make it to New York, roblimo has posted impressions of LWCE's first day, in which he takes note of Start buttons, prods Dell about laptops factory loaded with Linux, and watches the Golden Penguin Bowl. I suppose he was also asking vendors some of your questions.

Comments

Dell not selling Linux laptops

[ibennetch]

from the article: whichever distribution they [Dell] chose, it seemed most customers wanted another one...

This is a genuine problem in buying a laptop (as I understand it) -- not only do they have to pick a distribution (Debian, RH, etc) but also the role the computer will be fulfilling. If I'm going to be putting in a firewall, I don't want all kinds of other junk (web, mail, ftp servers, for instance; or games; or word processing programs) installed. If I'm getting a desktop for my use home office use, i don't want any type of server but I need the word processing programs -- how can they configure a computer properly? This isn't as much of an issue in the Windows world because most software costs money. The only real exception to this is RealPlayer, AOL, etc that come with the computer, and then we complain about the junk that is on our computers...

So, anyone have any thoughts on how companies like Dell can ship Linux computers, keeping in mind that in general only their more advanced users want Linux; and those people don't want any extra cruft on their systems?

Re:Dell not selling Linux laptops

[Ed Avis]

The article mentioned a sysadmin who bought Dell hardware but immediately wiped off the installed Linux and put Debian on there. The important part of buying Linux hardware is not the preinstalled OS (after all, there is no licence to worry about) but the fact that, because it ships with Linux, you know that all the hardware is supported.

Therefore if Dell sold Linux laptops with Red Hat on them, plenty of people would buy them and immediately install Mandrake. They wouldn't be as happy as if Mandrake were preinstalled, but it's a whole lot better than buying a laptop full of cheesy Winhardware. Also, don't forget you wouldn't have to pay for a copy of Windows you don't use (unless the vendor has restrictive agreements with Microsoft).

Re:Dell not selling Linux laptops

[JoeBuck]

What I would want from Dell and their competitors is not necessarily pre-installation of Linux on a laptop, but rather, sufficient assurance of what is in the machine so that I can buy with confidence, knowing that all the components are supported (or, if not, providing some hint as to whether this situation is expected to change in the near future). I'd prefer if the hardware manufacturer just gives enough information to allow the community to support the machine.

One way that this could work is for the company's websites to say "While we don't support Linux on the Gruntmaster 9000, here's a link to some pages run by our customers who are using it successfully". A company that does this might soon find itself with enough Linux customers that true support is economically feasible.

What's unacceptable is the common practice of changing some important component of the system without changing the model number, presenting a nasty surprise to the customer when he finds out that it doesn't work, contrary to six-month-old reports he read on the web.

Also, I'd like to see the Linux press do more evaluations of currently popular laptop brands for Linux compatibility. Yes, I know, if you aren't PC World the manufacturers don't send you their latest models for free. But we could be doing better.

MS in "doesn't like linux" shocker!

[peterpi]

From the article

"Not only that, an IBM employee I know personally gave me quite a rant about how I (and other journalists) ought to badger the people in Microsoft's booth unmercifully. "They're only here to tear down Linux," my IBM buddy said. "They hate Linux. They want to ruin us all. They don't belong here."

Gosh, who'd have thought it; a software company isn't fond of the competition.

I have a sneaky feeling that the Microsoft staff might have been told to expect a load of shit from fanatics.

Re:MS in "doesn't like linux" shocker!

[gosand]

Gosh, who'd have thought it; a software company isn't fond of the competition. I have a sneaky feeling that the Microsoft staff might have been told to expect a load of shit from fanatics.

Part of me wishes they would be chased out of there with torches and pitchforks, and the other part of me wishes that they would be completely ignored, with nobody even acknowledging they are there.

A long road ahead for linux

[Zebra_X]

This excerpt from the article is rather interesting I though.

"An awful lot of hardware vendors that push Linux on servers seem to feel it's just fine to have lots of Windows screens on the computers."

Sure, in an ideal world your sales people would also be very comfortable with the product and target platform. But the platform is Linux.

The answer this [booth sales person] gave: "Well, our software runs on all platforms -- Linux, Windows, AIX, Solaris... I'm a sales guy, not an engineer, so I don't know how to run Linux and I stick to Windows 'cause that's what I know."

Indeed it is. But I bet if you gave him OS X, he'd be fine with it. Linux as an OS, well that's a different story now isn't it?

OS X R00lZ D00D.

Re:A long road ahead for linux

[IamTheRealMike]

Indeed it is. But I bet if you gave him OS X, he'd be fine with it. Linux as an OS, well that's a different story now isn't it?

Unlikely. OS X is more different to Windows than the default Redhat 8 setup is. Where's the start menu? Where's the Control panel? Where's WinAmp?

The idea that people magically pick up OS X with no effort at all is a stupid one. A Mac takes ages to get used to, not only is it an entirely different OS but it has different hardware too. Mac-specific keyboards? One button mice? Even my mac-fanatic friend has bought a two-button with a scrollwheel mouse now (an MS one as well!). What's the button to get a right click menu again? What's that? I don't see any button labelled command! Oh, the one with the wierd squiggle.

5 minutes later. It's not working! Oh, not the Apple key then. What do you mean I didn't close the app? I don't see its windows. Oh yeah, I forgot you have to quit them manually. So what's the difference between closing and minimizing a window? Oh. Which should I do then?. Um, right. Where's the start button again?

Believe me, I've seen it with my own eyes. In contrast, the default Redhat 8 setup is pretty similar to Windows. Easy to change of course (first thing I did), but certainly easy for newbies.

Believe me, Linux is going to wipe the floor usability-wise with MacOS in a year or two. It has the advantage of not having any real history, virtual desktops and the X clipboard are about the only baggage and being semi-hidden features they are entirely optional for newbies. That means it can be as similar or as different to Windows as you want, depending on how sophisticated you want it to be. The Mac on the other hand has the same interface it had a decade ago basically, which was good when it was battling it out with Windows, but now the Windows UI is entrenched and 99% of people are used to it. Nowadays it's just quirky.

But Jobs won't change it! The, ah, unique GUI is basically what defines his product. Never mind that the rampant eyecandification of the MacOS UI has actually reduced its usability, not enhanced it, never mind the fact that changing parts of the Mac UI wouldn't actually make them less efficient to use. No, never mind all of that - it's set in stone and cannot be changed.

The salesguy would be happiest with something close to what he's used to, especially when they're dropped in it with no training. Clearly their managers don't really think of Linux on the desktop yet, to them it's just another product, just another day. But they will. Next time there'll be more such desktops as managers realise it's not so hard after all.

perhaps

[greechneb]

They need to offer a choice of distro disks when you customize. To make this work, they would have to have a distro already installed, just a base one, perhaps stick redhat on there, with a typical install, just to make their lawyers happy. Then let the buyer do what they want. Selling PC's without an OS installed would be a good way to make them lose their priveleged status with microsoft.

Probably not the best solution, but it was the best I could think of right now.

M$ new strategy?

[core plexus]

From the article: "Not only that, an IBM employee I know personally gave me quite a rant about how I (and other journalists) ought to badger the people in Microsoft's booth unmercifully. "They're only here to tear down Linux," my IBM buddy said. "They hate Linux. They want to ruin us all. They don't belong here."

I read an article at Cnet that had an interview Peter Houston, one of the directors charged with leading the new strategy, shortly before he got on a plane to attend the opening of LinuxWorld.

Speaking of which, over at CNET.com, there's an article about Linux revenues: " "Three and a half billion dollars in revenue--not bad for a free operating system," said James Governor, an analyst at research firm Redmonk. "It is clear that there are real, high-dollar Linux transformations going on" as companies switch from more expensive technology to Linux systems."

Man Gets 70mpg in Homemade Car-Made from a Mainframe Computer

Idiot salesdroids!

[Thud457]

"I guess people must trust those sales guys when they tell them..."

LOL LOL LOL!

If these companies claim that they can do "multi platform" they need to be showing "multi platform". Demonstrating your wares on the dominant OS defeats the whole purpose.

These sales idiots should be fired.
And the guy that hired them.
Then get some sales people who are bright enough to be trained up on *nix.

Dirty heathens.

my take on yesterday

[asv108]

I was there yesterday as well, there were a lot of good looking booths, Ximian's was probably the best ascetically. I went to both keynotes that day and the Golden Penguin bowl. Hector Ruiz's keynote was interesting, the Cray supercomputer running AMD was neat, but most of the presentation was marketing/pr, instead of anything informative but the AMD "Dr. Grip" style pens were nice.

The AMD booth was nice; they had some nifty opteron hardware up and running. A lot of the more interesting presentations were given on the show floor, Migel from Ximian had a session on Mono, but his mic wasn't working so we could hardly hear what he was saying. There was also a nifty lowdown on JXTA, Sun's open source P2P architecture. There were some others that looked promising as well, but you can only do so much in one day.

The second keynote was from Redhat's CIO talking about Linux and the finance industry. A good speech, but nothing earth shattering. The TCO examples and the architecture speel were nice, but for people are sitting in the audience at Linuxworld, they probably know this already. The Morgan Stanley case study was interesting, but nothing to get excited about, the adoption of Linux in the finance industry is old news.

The Golden Penguin bowl was boring, I don't know how they pick the guests, but quite a few of them didn't know some real easy questions. The question choice was lousy too. Most of the questions were either really obvious or really obscure to the point were not one person out of the six knew the answer. I left in the middle of the second round.

Overall, it was a good time but nothing crazy. I didn't see any celebrity developers, there were no earth shattering announcements. The biggest excitement for me during the day was opening up kismet and seeing 40 802.11b access points. I would like to thank Ximian for leaving their AP open with DHCP to the public. I would also like to than Redhat, I used their free hat to wipe off the soda that I spilled on my notebook.

Different from last year

[dslamguy]

I just came back from touring the exhibit hall. I had heard that Linuxworld was bigger this year, so I had been looking forward to going, but I was disapointed. The majority of the exhibitors were pushing products and services aimed towards enterprise server computing. That was it. Where was the embedded stuff (Montevista or Lineo)? Where were the desktop applications? I even have to ask where the distributions were. I saw SuSE and Red Hat. What happened to TurboLinux or Mandrake? Even the new guys like Lindows did'nt show up.

They need to rename the show LinuxEnterpriseWorld.

What a world. What a world.