Slashdot Mirror
Dell Releases First Consumer Product with Mandriva
WindozeSux writes "Dell Laptops(Latitude 110L) are now shipping with Mandriva Linux pre-installed. Mandriva says this represents a milestone to make Linux more available to consumers. From the article:"This product shows the world that Mandriva is today ready for the consumer market. We've been developing products for the corporate and enthusiast markets for years. Addressing the needs of the consumer market is a different challenge, because it is all the more difficult, as you don't have a system admin or professional technician at home", said François Bancilhon, Mandriva CEO"
The Dell Latitude line is geared toward business users. The Inspiron line is for home users. According to Dell's Linux page:
Dell does not officially support running Linux on Dell laptops."
So where can I order one of these things?
At only 759 euros (~ $940), the combination of Mandriva Linux and the Dell Latitude 110L is currently one of the most affordable notebooks available in developed countries.
It appears that it will only be available in europe. Or it could just be that Mandriva is from Europe.Bradley Holt
Get to know Mandriva before flaming it ...
First, Mandriva is TOTALLY open source. In fact, of the major commercial distributions Mandriva was the first to do so. Go read section 4-6 of Mandrakesoft's 8 Golden Rules
Not only is it fully OSS, but they give you all the instructions and such to fork your own Mandriva based distro easily (look at the popular PCLinuxOS as an example) Google for "mandrivasoft wiki" and have ball forking your own.
Secondly, if you've actually engaged with the Mandriva community, you'll notice that it is comprised of both employees and non-employees. The non-employees deal with real packages and stuff, and not bull-shit non-important packages.
Sunny Dubey
http://www.addonshop.com/
http://www.sub300.com/
http://www.linare.com/
http://www.linspire.com/
http://www.linuxcertified.com/
http://www.microtelpc.com/
http://www.outpost.com/
http://shoprcubed.com/
http://www.systemax.com/divisions.htm
http://www.walmart.com/
http://www.xandros.com/
http://tuxmobil.org/
http://www.us.debian.org/distrib/pre-installed
http://www.linux.org/vendor/system/index.html
It doesn't look that way. I just checked out Dell USA's web site and didn't see an available option for Mandriva. It was Windoze XP all the way. Oh, well... Emperor Linux still does a really good job with laptops and Linux.
MIT is heavy on the Linux usage, I hear. And here at Cornell, they've got no problems with non-Windows OSes like Linux or Mac. We even have a lab full of Linux computers.
I've got two of my own Linux machines on the network right now. In fact, one of them IS running Linux on a Celeron, the other on a Sempron.
I'm sure there are plenty of schools who are Linux- as well as Mac-friendly.
I haven't a clue, but this guy or this guy might.
We apologize for the preceding message. All those responsible have been sacked.
I've been using the OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta for a while, and it's gotten a lot better at opening MS Office files. If you install the MS fonts, it's hard to even see a difference in most files. I regularly use it on MS Office files people send me, and it hasn't failed yet. The beta is just about perfect. But there are some problems still, admittedly.
.odt documents to .rtf usually works, but there are some distinct formatting problems that have given me grief. I regularly generate files in manuscript format (in other words, double spaced, 1-inch margins, Courier-style monospace font, with headers in a "Author / Title / Page" format). If the document includes a single-spaced introduction at the top of the first page, then converting it to .rtf seems to drop all other text.
.doc format works fine.
Converting
That's a serious bug. Of course, converting to MS
I'm all for Linux on the desktop, but confusing new users by having no GUI for Printer configuration (among other omissions and inconsistancies) can't help the cause.
I haven't had to touch the command line to install my HP Deskjet 932c printer under Linux (multiple versions of ubuntu, fedora, centos, and suse) for several years. Honestly, what crappy distro (or crappy printer) are you using that the printer installation gui can't autodetect it?
But you can get Mandriva free, though. I used it for quite a while and it's still quite good that way. They do have an along-side free distro.
Insert Clever Sig Here.
typing this on Mandriva LE 2005... It's far superior to Red Hat Workstation or FC-anything IMHO. SuSE is supposed to be very good, but in my experience has more of the non-standardisms that you refer to.
Mandrake's GUI configuration tools are decent enough, though I tend to use the config files myself. They don't commit the Linuxconf sin, they're open source, they work.
The package management is where things get far superior. I've used urpmi for several years and it's always worked better for me than apt4rpm or red-carpet or yum or up2date. Too bad that so many other distros put Not Invented Here over using a mature open-source platform that someone else wrote...
As far as package choice, it comes preconfigured to make some fairly solid choices, though they're not perfect for my needs. Still, I think it's a good solution (or at least, no worse than any other Linux distro) for the non-technical user. I have my doubts about giving Linux to non-technical home users at all, but that's another discussion...
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I'm sure that if Microsoft's behavior was well-documented, the kernel would work the same way it did. The problem is, there are no good specifications on what windows does. The bios manufacturers don't obey the specs, they just tweak their bios until it works with Windows.
As a long time Mandrake user *and* a fulltime sys admin I'd say for users-space Mandrake's offering is one of the best. But I'd also suggest that thats no-where near where it needs to be if they are planning Windows/Mac area market penetration.
:)
Its hardware detection has been some of the best for some time now, driver support, clean interface, all good things. Their configuration utilities knock Yast and FC.X off the butts, but they are a LONG way from providing either complete or reliable management solutions. Their package management solution is RPM based, but it excels well beyond YUM and its probably fair to say its on par with Debian's apt-get system, but you also have rpmdrake which wraps a comfy clear, easy-to-use GUI around it.
As far as commercial distros its the bee's-knees (although I haven't installed that free Linspire disk yet) and has the added bonus of being one of the few commercial companies going after the user desktop that still shows a commitment to the GPL.
That said, development hasn't shown any remarkable leaps in usability. Its a Linux distro and for the most part its about as good as any other favorite might be. It requires a hobbiest or enthusiast to use still, unless they've got something big they've been keeping under wraps, but 2005 (aka Mandriva) isn't remarkably better or worse then previous releases and they, along with most every other distro seem to be sticking pretty closely to the status quo, which isn't as innovative as I expect would be required to penetrate that particular consumer space, but I'm a sys admin, what do I know.
Quack, quack.
What are you talking about? Granted I'm running Mandrake 10 and not the absolute latest Mandriva, but I find it hard to believe that they spontaneously dropped support for something they've had since the earliest version I used, 7.something.
Nope, just checked, they haven't. It looks like 2006 beta 1 will use gcc4.