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HP Starts Pushing Desktop Linux
iswm writes "HP has supposedly been selling MandrakeSoft Linux on the desktop for a while but has been so quiet about it that for all intents and purposes it's been a stealth operation. That's all about to change, with two new Linux desktops ready for rolling out by HP to the North American SMB market, both boxes to be sold with Mandrake Linux."
The article briefly mentions the fact that Mandrake is going to emerge from bankruptcy and pay off a 3.3 million euro debt. It's made me curious how much Mandrake made from the HP move.
Did HP just take mandrake with a few modifications and put it on, or was a licence purchased?
I really think this is going to be the Year of Linux!
I question how much they've been selling cause Mandrake Soft surely wouldn't have had a close shave with bankruptcy if HP was throwing even a bit of its weight behind it.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Strange alliances indeed. This is prolly gonna scare the craap outta Microsoft.
Sig* sig = theOneSig();
...but every deployment of linux in a large scale like this makes me smile and go "up yours SCO. one more victim to sue to drain your warchest"
So I'm petty. sue me. There's lots like me
Wow, HP is really doing everything right so far. Signing deals with Apple, Starbucks, and now Mandrake. My respect for the company has shot up within the last few months.
What really surprises me is that companies seem to always introduce Linux to their low end computers (Walmart anyone?). A lot of high end Unix workstations are still being sold out there, why aren't more companies pushing a high end Linux workstation?
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org
mandrake wasn't installed. they just included a mandrake disk.
there was some minimal linux install just so you could boot it.
While Mandrake may not be the best distro, it is probably the best for new users, and at least a better alternative than that FreeDOS Dell offers
Setec Astronomy
You haven't used Mandrake, have you?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Time for Microsoft to crank that brain-wash ray up to full power.
01100010 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101
I've found Mandrake to have the best visual user configuration programs out there. I do think it's the most user friendly. However, I also think it's less stable than some of the other distrobutions because of staying on the edge of new software releases. Obviously we don't want a Debian stable for the desktop user, but I think Mandrake is less stable than Windows XP.
The new users won't necessarily care how far the strides GNU/Linux has made, but realize that it's still not as easy to use as Windows and (IMO) not as stable as XP either!
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
Thats what I was thinking about too. In the past MS has had exclusionary contracts with the hardware vendors that only Microsoft's Windows would be pre-loaded on a line of computers. So if HP sold Linux or Solaris x86 or whatever on a line of computers then they had to pay full retail for any copies of Ms Windows they sold with that line. (IIRC about $200 for full license of W9x as opposed to ~50 OEM pricing.) Are those kind of exclusionary contracts prohibited now by the anti-trust settlement?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
It's a shame that we keep going back to this. I think there is something here that we can all agree on. Linux - in order to reach true desktop user status - needs to be able to divorce itself in some virtual fashion from the command line. That is - what happens behind the scenes must stay there, and have a pretty GUI on top of every piece of Linux. Heck, my sister was even intimidated by the boot output on my Gentoo distro, simply because it was just lines and lines of text. (Yes, I am aware I can install a boot screen.)
Simply said, I cannot wait until linux has the ability to be a command-line only OS and at the same time, a GUI only OS. Mandrake comes damn close. So do some others. It's right around the corner now...
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
As much as I hate HP desktop machines ....... and believe me I HATE HP DESKTOPS........ this sounds like a really good thing. Maybe they decided that windows had a little too much overhead to run on their crapboxes so they switched to something that ran more efficiently. People will not have a problem with mandrake if they sit down and use it a little.
I have always found it funny when people, especially older people like my parents, shy away from non-windows systems because they think it is too hard to use, and then I have to show them how to use IE in windows and how to dial up (yeah, modem) to the internet.
Will Joe Six Pack looking for a cheap computer
Actually, a friend of mine installed mandrake 9.2 on his computer. He was asking me something over AIM, and I told him to open a terminal, and... He paused and said, "Uh, how do I get to a terminal?"
So see it is possible for an under average computer user to enjoy Linux on the desktop without needing a command line.
Small-Medium Business as opposed to home and enterprise markets
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Yes, because if Microsoft cut off HP, customers would just suck it up and start using Mandrake the next time they wanted a new PC, right?
More realistically HP PC sales would fall through the floor as people would just deal with other vendors and save themselves the trouble. To most consumers an HP box is a box just like any -- generally an interchangable commodity part. Claiming that HP holds the power position in such a scenario seems dubious.
Of course this is a silly academic exercise anyways. Microsoft was barred, via the whole antitrust thing, from performing such retaliatory practices. Microsoft doesn't have the option to, as you claim, "cut off their own balls".
Exactly.
/. or care to understand why their MS Works (*shudder*) won't install on their new machine.
The trouble is that the people who buy HPs (low-end, cheap machines--the desktops, at least.) are not the people who read
I'm afraid that, in an attempt to lower their bottomeline they're forgetting their current market, but who knows? Maybe, with this, they'll get a new market. At the very least, it should be really interesting to see how other companies respond and how succeessful HP is in this venture.
-Grym
At the moment, Linux is viewed as good enough for the desktop of people who only use their computers as a glorified communications device. We're talking Internet, Mail, and Office utilities. These users want to do these three things without viruses, spyware, hardware upgrades, and crufty Operating Systems that crash. As for users who want to use a PC for gaming, music, and multimedia... Linux is probably not the best choice. However, when it comes to getting work done without all the nonsense, Linux is where it's at.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
A distro that constantly gives back to the commmunity, provides free isos for download, concentrates on the desktop, and manages to make a profit? Who'd have thought?
With this corporate support, you can go out and buy a -supported- HP/Mandrake desktop. Which means you have Linux supported hardware if you don't like Mandrake.
All sorts of good things in the future...
This guy is way out there
Someday, someone will explain to me why 'We' want linux to be adopted by the other 95% of the market. 'we' all lament what has happened to the Internet since 'they' finally found out about it (and thought it had just been invented). We pine about the good old days of the usenet, when it was like, useful.
I dread a scenario where, around 2005, everyone and their grandma is buying a Linux box (that new OS that just came out year or so ago). And it all goes to shit. You just know it will.
Everyone will run as root, open viruses, execute them. All our favorite apps will become add-filled feature-burdened piles of stinking filth rushed to market despite thousands of high severity bugs.
It willl suck hard and we'll all look back fondly on the good old days.
Someday, someone will explain to me why 'We' want linux to be adopted by the other 95% of the market.
More market share than, say, Mac OS X means more chance of getting manufacturers of newer peripherals to put effort into writing drivers or at least into providing free software developers with technical information sufficient to write and maintain a driver. Lack of drivers is the primary reason I'm still on Windows 2000, as the copy of Mandrake I tried a few months ago didn't work with my Radeon 9000 card (except in unaccelerated VESA mode), and Microtek denies the SANE developers any information about my scanner (a Scanmaker 4850).
Hah!
Sadly, I tend to agree. I'll never forget the fury I felt when I opened up my HP Pavilion a few years ago to find that they had combined the soundcard and modem onto one PCI card. This wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't of put a fake PCI cover on the back of the computer to make them look like the two cards were separate, and THAT wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't of put the cover for the fake "modem" right in the way of my only advertised "free" PCI slot.
It was very deceptive. And the only reason was so they could say "one free PCI slot" on the box, knowing damn well that not only was that PCI slot unusable but nearly nobody is going to open it up in the store to figure it out. So the net effect of this ridiculous situation wass was that I had to buy a new soundcard and modem (for a modem issue) and from then on, I tell every person who asks (and that's a lot, since I'm in a tech support position) to avoid HP like he plague.
-Grym
I heard Mandrake was one of the easiest distros to use in terms of configuration and drivers. Sp I gave 9.2 a shot after getting the isos on FTP sites.
THE GOOD
1. Much prettier interface. Everything from the icons to the taskbar, to Konqueror was top notch
2. All my hardware worked right away; sound card, mouse, keyboard, video card, with exception of my Palm Pilot cradle. I had some monitor problems as you'll read about as well.
3. Speedy as hell. You'd run a program and it would actually run within a reasonable time.
4. Internet worked right off the bat. Awesome.
5. The video player played a lot of files easy-peasy and I didn't have to fight with codecs.
6. I could still access my Windows folders. Another great benefit.
THE BAD
1. My mouse was uncontrollable. XP has both a speed and acceleration option that is great for mouse control. The mouse options box in Mandrake didn't have these options and it was frustrating to use the mouse, even after twinking these settings for an hour.
2. By far the biggest problem: Installing programs. In XP it's as easy as double clicking an icon and picking a directory. Not so with Linux. You can read my post on the newbie forums
here.
I have no idea where anything installs to, nor the best way to uninstall things. Inevitably I have to use the command line. Even as an X-MSDOS user I found it very frustrating.
3. Despite claims of stability, Konqeror crashed repeatedly. I can not say why.
4. After installing a program, finding where it installed to would be like pulling teeth. Making a shortcut would be even worse.
5. Installing the correct driver for my soundcard was very complicated, even after reading the INSTALL file. I eventually gave up.
6. I got a sync out of range message when I first tried running Mandrake. I left the monitor settings on default during install. This took hours to discover and fix.
But above all installing programs is a pain. This means, once the desktop is setup, Mandrake is a dream. But configuring it requires far too much expertise, at least it seems like it. I found myself posting time and time again on the forums. They were very helpful people but their answers often left me more confused than I started.
I'm not trying to flame, just provide constructive criticism and ways to help make Mandrake better. I wish them the best.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
dx2000 Specs from HP:
- Linux - Mandrake 9.2
- Intel(R) Pentium(R)2.80A GHz/533MHz
- 256MB DDR 400MHz (2X128)
- Integrated Intel(R) Extreme graphics2 (64MB equivalent)
- 40GB PATA/100 5400RPM
- 16X/40X DVD-ROM Linux and audio cable for Linux
$627Choosing Linux instead of XP gets you an upgrade to a DVD player from a plain CD, and saves you $21. Hum.
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$tar -xvf
One major reason to want free software to be adopted by the rest of the market is so that open standards dominate, and I don't have to choose between MSN and not talking to all my friends. So I don't have to pay for software to read office documents that are sent to me.
Re: viruses, your worst case sounds no worse than the current state. The favourite apps will not become ad-filled because the base is open. Someone puts an ad in, fork the last one.
...Microsoft would gladly take away your ability to obtain cheap, Linux compatible commodity hardware (all for the sake of security, of course). If there are lots and lots of companies building Linux boxes, MS will find it a lot harder to do that.
As for everyone running as root and viruses, how is that different from when they run Windows? As for our apps, I use free ones. I know better than to run some shmuck's pop up blocker when I've got Mozilla and Konqueror.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Does that mean we will see iTunes ported to Linux? Bundle that with Linux, and you might drive sales of the HP iPod......
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Plus every HP Mandrake PC comes with free indemnification against SCO lawsuits!
I should buy some cement.
Someday, someone will explain to me why 'We' want linux to be adopted by the other 95% of the market. 'we' all lament what has happened to the Internet since 'they' finally found out about it (and thought it had just been invented). We pine about the good old days of the usenet, when it was like, useful.
Usenet is a communications mechanism, not software. When Microsoft put the BSD FTP client on every desktop did that affect you at all? When Winzip became popular did that hurt people who use infozip? Ignore the consumer distributions of Linux and move on with your life.
I dread a scenario where, around 2005, everyone and their grandma is buying a Linux box (that new OS that just came out year or so ago). And it all goes to shit. You just know it will.
No it won't. They'll use Lycoris. You'll use Gentoo or Dragonfly or some other 'leet *nix distribution. There will be essentially no interaction between the two. Why do you care? You're like a high school student who is afraid that they won't be cool and unique if everyone else listens to the same music they do.
Everyone will run as root, open viruses, execute them.
So what? Why does it matter to you whether these viruses come from computers running Linux rather than Windows?
All our favorite apps will become add-filled feature-burdened piles of stinking filth rushed to market despite thousands of high severity bugs.
Sure. Grandma is going to ask for a graphical interface in VI and smilies in Berkley mail.
It willl suck hard and we'll all look back fondly on the good old days
The usual elitist blah blah.
Now, with this HP development, I have to wonder if we're going to see more of the same, particularly since there's no mention that the Mandrake-equipped boxes will be any cheaper than their XP counterparts. Granted, there are some people who, for whatever reason, feel some dislike for Microsoft ;) And these people might be willing to have their computer ship without an XP license solely to deprive Microsoft of a few dollars.
But I have to think that most people, if they can't get a discount by going without Windows, would want to receive XP. After all, why turn down something that's free, and something you might decide to install later -- if only to make the machine more valuable for resale?
With this in mind, the option of ordering Linux boxes from major manufacturers just isn't all that exciting unless there's some kind of discount involved. Once you have the option to save thirty dollars by ordering your HP or Dell without XP, that will really be news.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
When that happens 'we' will move on the the next greatest thing. Maybe Amiga, maybe plan-9, maybe atheos or something.
It's like a city. In a city there are the slums, artists all move to the slums because they can't afford to live on the other side of the tracks. Eventually the artists section of town becomes fashionable because all the cool galleries, restaurants and clubs are there and the yuppies move in. Prices skyrocket the artists move the next slum and the whole cycle starts over again.
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.
You are 100% absolutely wrong. You could not be more wrong if were actually trying to be wrong.
The primary audience is the CEO. Linux desktops are ideal for the corporate environment. That's where they will rule first and foremost. Linux gives businesses more options and more freedom when it comes to the desktop. This means a business may choose to run thick or thin clients, they can centralize all software so upgrades are a snap, they can effectively lock down desktops and won't have to worry about their users clicking on emails or web sites that carry virus payloads. Of course they also get to save a buttload of money and dictate their own upgrade schedule too.
Once the corporate desktop belongs to linux then the home users will also adopt it so they can take their work home.
that's what happened to windows, that's what's going to happen to linux.
Look at what HP is doing, they are selling these PCs at small businesses not Joe Shmoe. IBM and SUN are also selling linux to the corporate desktop.
Here is my prediction. By the end of 2005 Linux will have reached critical mass on the corporate desktop. By that I mean around 20% of all corporate desktops in the world (not the US though) will be running a linux desktop. It will double in 2006 and then the growth will slow down because the US businesses will be very slow to migrate to it.
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.
But I have to think that most people, if they can't get a discount by going without Windows, would want to receive XP. After all, why turn down something that's free, and something you might decide to install later -- if only to make the machine more valuable for resale?
You have a good point, but I cannot resist noting that between dealing with spyware, a future SP2 release that may break who knows what software, and product activation worries that there is an old quote with a new twist that seems very applicable:
"Windows XP is only free if your time has no value".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't underestimate the power of the dark side.
There is a multi-trillion dollar economy out there that is currently ignoring Linux almost entirely. If that industry turns to Linux as it's bread-and-butter OS, all will change, forever.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
Just as the web became riddled with OBJECT tags and Flash menus, Linux distros will follow the money and be ruled by the desires of the PHBs that control that money. There will be ads. There will be godawful UI's. Talking paperclips. And....DRM!!!
Finally, we will find out that Linus is Bill Gates' son.
The major reason we want Linux to become a popular OS is that more third-party software will be ported to Linux.
Windows, being the current popular OS, has thousands of independent yet commercial developers and companies investing time, effort and research making cool tools and apps for it.
As a developer, it's great to have tools like Emacs and Python for free. But let's face it: some top notch tools probably won't be replaced by OSS any time soon. It just requires too much effort, research, and knowledge (much of which is patented by Adobe) to create a graphic suite as powerful as Adobe CS.
So making Linux popular is the only way to lure all these powerful art and development tools to the Linux environment.
Little things like killing CD-ROM drives
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.0 release on a new kernel series is always problematic (do you remember 8.0?).
No drives were killed, their firmware was merely overwritten becuase the drive was non-compliant. Drives with never firmware didn't exhibit the problem (so, obviously LG was aware of the problem, they just didn't bother to inform *their* customers). LG provided a means to reflash the firmware on the drives (for those that had already had the firmware overwritten) and tools to update the firmware for those as-yet unaffected.
BTW, the patch that caused the problem originated with SuSE
And, Gentoo had the same problem, they just have so little market share no-one was bothered to fix the problem until Mandrakesoft found the cause
screwed up menus
Guess who didn't install updates for 9.2
non bootable boot CDs
On some hardware, only on the download version, and CD2 does boot and can be used to start installation (and all of this is covered in the errata).
10.X been out a week or so and already 400MB of patches!
10.0 Community has been out for a week. And, that's the whole point of the community release, to iron out all the really minor issues that end-users really care about, but some of us couldn't care less about.
You should really wait for 10.0 Official to give out to newbies
Mandrake is often more cutting edge. 2.6 Kernel and so forth but Cutting Edge often means you bleed.
So, install the 2.4 kernel available with the distro.
A
Just as the web became riddled with OBJECT tags and Flash menus, Linux distros will follow the money and be ruled by the desires of the PHBs that control that money. There will be ads. There will be godawful UI's. Talking paperclips. And....DRM!!!
... with the possibility of a trend in user education if the vendors will give a damn.
Sure, but you're talking commercial linux distros here. There will be always the side - Debian, Gentoo, Fedora and the people who care will just (e)merge the good (GPL) parts of the other side and leave the bad ones. I for one don't see Debian and DRM mixing too well >:)
It's not going to be much different from today - and the GP poster has a point. The "popular choice" will be something like Lindows or Lycoris for desktop users - and remember that Lindows already has those problems, default root and 'windows-type convenience' (hah!) So there will be 'secure Linux boxes' and 'insecure Linux boxes'
But the most important part is: if you're using a GPL distro you won't care about commercialized Linux! no, scratch that - you will probably get drivers due to commercial Linux distros, so it's not that bad.
You're right about one thing.
.... and guess how many people are going to do as instructed?
We'll see wave after wave of trojan programs that require the superuser password in order to work
Already there are loads of Linux apps that require Superuser intervention... take CD-Roast for example.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
You're full of it. You are trying to say, with a straight face, that people expected Linux to take over the desktop in *'98*?
Most of the time in the past was people getting excited about the ability for *geeks* to use exclusively Linux -- Open Office, Samba, etc made it feasible to work with Windows users and still keep using Linux.
Red Hat's CEO said, what, six months ago that Linux isn't ready for the desktop war just yet?
This year and last year are big because there are a lot of major open source apps coming out and being *usable*, by *typical users*, at at least a basic level, as a substitute for Windows apps.
Finally, if you don't think Linux usability has improved massively since '98, you just plain don't remember 98. We had no GNOME or KDE apps. Preference dialogs didn't exist. Widget sets were Tk, and black-and-white Athena. Boxes required a serious sysadmin to secure out-of-box.
Last year, I agree that there were a lot of people on Slashdot that were predicting big gains on the desktop. And guess what? A bunch of governments and big companies starting transition processes, or at least made it much more easy to move a chunk at a time to Linux. If anything, I'm surprised that things are going this quickly.
My prediction is that Linux will break 10% desktop market share before the end of 2006. That is a *huge* number of users to move from one platform to another -- perhaps around 100 million users -- , but remember that there's a threshhold effect at which point application vendors, people doing file formats, etc cannot ignore Linux, and once that hump is over, it becomes much easier to move to Linux.
Web sites are already improving -- I don't see the number of "IE-only" sites that I did thanks to the spread of Mozilla, Linux, and Mac OS X running Safari.
That being said, I think that as Microsoft gets more worried, they will do whatever it takes to fight back effectively. That may be as far as moving to a Linux-based distribution and porting their products to it. Microsoft is unlikely to die, no matter what.
May we never see th
Remember that an HP PC executive was the first person quoted in the MS antitrust findings, "if we had a choice, you'd be second".
:)
:)
There is no love lost between parts of the company, especially the original HP. Compaq, on the other hand, have thrived for years by sucking up to the man, and been very good at it. Yet if you look at the workstation and server lines, they have been certified for linux distros for a while (usually redhat 'premium' stuff), and been orderable with the OS. No retributions yet
The biggest risk with MS is that they will cut the company out of some big special, like a new product, like getting so many people on longhorn beta test, etc. They would probably do that today except that MS know they dont have a choice. The HP/Compaq PC line is a big enough chunk of sales that they dont dare walk away.
At the same time, I can imagine a lot of high level voicemails going back and forth
Good to know:
One should not trust that HP figures for sold linux desktops represents actual new linux users.
As there is no windows license fee with the machines, my organisation buys (last batch around 15000 units) these configurations and then use our select/corporate windows license on them. This cuts us a great deal of costs from the otherwise mandatory per. computer windows license.