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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?
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
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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.
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?
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.