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HP Shipping Turbolinux HP in Asia
An anonymous reader noted that "Turbolinux just
announced they will be distributing
TurboLinux 10 Desktop
with HP's Compaq business Desktop PCs in 12 Asian countries, including
China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore,
Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. "
Financial Times Article: HP to install Linux in Asian products
Here
found here
Hong Kong isn't a country.
Grep it for HP and Compaq. Now grep it for IBM.
So I would say HP is as committed as IBM. Both have something to gain by linux. They just have different ways of going about it. Yes that Linux add is nice. Helping making the kernel available for free is also nice.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Although HP is selling some Turbolinux installed systems in India, all their ads(in newspaper) show "HP recommends MS windows XP". They are selling preinstalled-linux just to save XP's license fee, which they otherwise have to pay if they sell windows pre-installed machines.
One may wander why Turbolinux and not say Red Hat is being shipped by HP and it seems they are just picking the strongest player there. TL had strong presence in Asia from its beginnings even though they had to close their US offices in July 2002 due to the mismanaged capital they had. They kept going in Asia and so now are apparently the most recognized Linux brand there. Their new desktop product in version 10 had no reviews amongst Linux analysts, I wonder if someone had the chance to try that distro recently.
IP was invented for the sake of lawsuits.
Boo, hiss HP.
But they do support most of their printers. Their PCL and PostScript clone ones work perfectly with well documented PDLs.
See linuxprinting.org and their offically supported HP Linux Inkjet Driver Project. Unfortunately cost-cutting and outsourcing of some product development and resulting patent issues has made this less than perfect; but they are trying.
TurboLinux is an Asian distribution and has better support for Asian languages, especially Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Also it makes sense for support that you'd use a distro that alrady has a local presence if possible. They all should be able to use the same drivers and any other model-specific hacks.
No kidding! Just because it "ships" with linux does not nessecarily mean that all hardware on board will be supported as well as windows, or even at all.
True story that happened to me in the late 90's - I was at Frys, looking for a new network card or two. At the time, I was running either Mandrake or RedHat, as I recall. Anyways, I hadn't brought along a printout of supported cards under linux, because I assumed that they would say on the box whether it was supported by linux. Unfortunately, none of them did, maybe because the drivers were written by 3rd parties. But lo and behold, there was a network card that came with a free CD of TurboLinux! I believe it was an SMC, might've been a D-Link. I assumed that if it came with a copy of linux(even a minor distro like TurboLinux), that it must have hardware support, so I bought two of the things and went home. Only then did I discover that there was no driver for it, and the company had apparently just thrown in TurboLinux as a "freebie" to entice people, with no promise of support. I thought that was somewhat misleading, to say the least - if you're gonna ship an OS with some hardware, it is implied that the hardware is supported by the OS...
Anyways, I doubt HP is pulling a scam like that, but just wanted to warn you just in case. I also don't want to disparage TurboLinux, it's not their fault they got used in such a way. I was just reminded of the story 'cause that's my only previous run-in with TurboLinux.