Slashdot Mirror
Dell Teams Up With SUSE
An anonymous reader writes "Dell's Linux blog points to the news that Dell and SUSE have teamed up to start offering SUSE Enterprise Linux installed directly on Dell servers. Looks like Dell isn't just a Red Hat shop anymore."
This is a 2 days old story http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2004/10/p r04072.html
Mess with the best, die like the rest
Don't worry about the text, they merely point here: http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx /corp/pressoffice/en/2004/2004_10_27_rrwa_000
Which is mirrored here: http://mirrordot.org/stories/c6067beb11e039d913a6d cb073ee1d71/index.html
Dell still charges the "Windows Tax" on all its workstations. Try ordering a Dimension series without Windows, for instance. Not possible! They only offer Linux on two particular models of workstation (Precision) which are expensive and are limited in what video cards you can purchase with them.
Dell only seems to want to support Linux on the server side. They should support Linux all the way! If they don't want to offer it pre-installed on their workstations, they should at least offer a machine without Windows.
Argh!
-Z
3 clicks
Dell|Small Business|Desktops
"Dell Alternative Operating System Desktops" is listed right there with the others. 'N Series' Dimension, Optiplex, or Precision. Either RH or no OS (FreeDOS in the box).
The Dimension N starts at $319
"Dell(TM) Dimension(TM) n series desktops offer affordable, everyday small business computing power. Extra economical because they come without a Microsoft® operating system; a copy of FreeDOS(TM) open-source operating system is included in the box, ready to install."
Even with the release of a personal edition missing, SuSE still lets you try out every release either as a LiveCD or as a completely free ftp install (which in the past pretty much equalled the Personal version).
AFAIK, the difference between SuSE Personal and SuSE Professional was just the amount of software (=CDs) shipped with it. Apart from that, they were the same anyway.
Albeit, the ftp release is always about a month late compared to the official CD release but I reckon if you get something completely free, you should be able to accept a slight delay.
> I remember similar statements back then on comp.os.linux.advocacy and they've turned out to be just as false when it comes to fortelling Linux's future. I've come to accept Linux will never be anything more than a fringe operating system, but there's nothing wrong with that. Hell, MacOS is a fringe operating system compared to the numbers Windows has yet MacOS X is one of the nicest systems I've ever used.
So the progress Linux is making is slower than it's advocates and fanboys would like, but this does in no way imply no progress has been made, or is unlikely to happen in the future. I believe your use of the word "never" is an equally unfounded exageration. The server market is still growing, the desktop market is growing, and upcoming OSS software like OpenOffice 2.0 and Firefox 1.0 will only help to further our cause.
The 2.6 branch is becomming more production ready, as well. I'm running 2.6.9 on Gentoo and much more satisfied than I was with, say, 2.6.5
As for MacOS X, clearly it will allways be a fringe operating system simply because ppc and ppc64 are fringe architectures. The Linux kernel has no such limitations... quite the opposite, in fact.
The unofficial