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"

Comments

This is a Good Thing

[poofyhairguy82]

Desktop Linux needs support from the big computer makers more than anything to succeed. Its interesting that Dell is pushing Mandriva with its laptops and HP recently began doing the same thing with its laptops and Ubuntu. I know from experiance that Linux on laptops can be tough, but mostly thats because the hardware won't work. If I can buy an Dell or an HP laptop with some distro of Linux on it that works with wireless and suspend hardware that works with Linux, then it really doesn't matter which one is on it when its shipped to me. I can put whatever I choose....avoiding the biggest problems with laptops and Linux!

I say bring them on Dell, HP. You might have found a way to make me (and many other geeks) customers again.

Re:This is a Good Thing

[MichaelSmith]

I know from experiance that Linux on laptops can be tough

I previously ran Mandrake 10 on my HP nx9010 laptop. Hardware support was not the best. Power and sound did not work correctly.

I recently installed Ubuntu and hardware support is now much better. This makes me wonder if HP have been directly helping the debian/ubuntu people with ther drivers.

proper market segment

[magarity]

you don't have a system admin or professional technician
 
This, and the article says it's being sold direct to students. I went back to school for another degree last year and the specs for the required notebook said Windows XP Pro or 2000 ONLY. The networking people won't let you connect to the school LAN with anything else. I suspect other schools have similar policies. Linux preinstalled systems should be the high end models for hard core technical users, not the nearly bare bones Celeron student models, IMNSHO.

Re:proper market segment

[level_headed_midwest]

Yeah, and the IT guys at my school say the same thing. But the truth is that both they and I use Linux and nobody has any problems at all with it- they just won't *support* it if you have trouble like they will support OSX and 2K/XP.

Re:This is irritating

[Travoltus]

This is how I would make a profit off of Linux, if I were of the mindset to do so.

Linux of any sort is pretty much free (as in GPL'd), so it's hard if not impossible for me to sell you the uncompiled version. This is a given.

But I can sell service instead. I could sell you the hard work I did to compile everything and make sure it works fine together. That saves a lot of people time, and in business time means money. To compile it for the 64bit systems, I could assert that it's twice as difficult, ergo twice as expensive.

But then that pricing model is endangered the moment someone hand compiles their own version of the source code, puts it out in the wild, and has it polished by a million other contributors into a fork distribution that can be passed around via bittorrent for free.

Countering that, I can imply my version is more stable than those "garage hack" distros, and the phb's and store managers might be dum^H^H^Hconvinced enough to believe me and purchase my boxed laminated product.

How is this news?

[keosak]

I don't see, why should it be called "a milestone". In my country (Czech Republic) almost all PC vendors let user choose whick OS he/she wants. Besides Windows and Linux they also provide FreeDOS. I think there is a law forbidding selling computer set without operating system, so this is a way to go for people who want to install they own system and dont't want to pay for Windows. I don't know what is usual in USA but I would expect the same. Can someone explain it to me, please?

Must be Vista OEM pricing time.

[PAPPP]

Having seen dell in action "considering" AMD in hopes of squeezing more discounts out of Intel, and seeing as Microsoft has a new version of Windows coming along, my guess is that this is just posturing to squeeze better discounts out of Microsoft on Vista OEM pricing.
It's a nice thought, but probably just a ploy.

News.... yeah.. I guess.

[fshalor]

But not that big. Sure, you could get Dell's with dedhat before.

I may get one actually, since I need a good laptop with linux running on it. I've had a lot of luck buying a winblows machine and then rolling my linux install, but sometimes vendors play too shifty with components.

Which is why I'd stillbe concerned about this one. The vendor I've had the most issues with *shifty* components lately is dell.

And I like AMD/s.

Comment and Question

[RAMMS EIN]

``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''

With a good Linux distro, there's less of a need to. Less computer expertise is needed to keep the system free of malware, and if it works now, it will still work years down the road (barring hardware failures). Also, desktop distros can and do include lots of drivers for various pieces of hardware, so that you can just plug in your device and start using it. YMMV, but I've had more success with this on Linux than what I see in the Windows world.

Now for the question: how good is Mandriva Linux these days? My experience with Mandrake wasn't particularly good, and I'd hate to see Linux get more bad rap because Dell chose to ship with an inferior distro. I assume polish won't be a problem, but what about package management? Does dependency resolution work? Do all packages work? Is the collection of available packages large enough? What about the software that comes pre-installed? Does it cover most users' needs, or would most people have to install extra software first thing when they get the machine? To what extent are Linux skills transferable to and from other distros (proprietary configuration tools, heavily customized desktops, etc)?

Re:This is irritating

[MichaelSmith]

"apparent cost" my friend.

I work for a large multinational company. I am currently studying source control systems for an eventual move away from cvs.

Chances are it will come down to a choice between commercial and open source systems, and that the commercial system will win for exactly the reason you have stated.

When you think about it this is a good thing. The open source project could sell a premium package (or something), and actually make some money for a change.

Re:This is irritating

[LnxAddct]

Red Hat? You mean that company that provides you with glib? That company that maintains GCC? Or wait do you mean that money grabbing corporation that has devoted hordes of developers to everything from Apache and Gnome to integrating SELinux into the kernel. That price tag on cygwin is way too high for me. And Fedora or CentOS (which red hat engineers have helped work on), they are both above my budget. I hope Red Hat stops giving away their directory server or GFS too because noone would ever need those.

The truth is, Red Hat open sources everything they do, if you want the source to their enterprise line, go and download it or go to CentOS which already did the work for you. Red Hat is at the core of OSS and without them, we'd all be much further back then where we are now. The only thing Red Hat charges for is enterprise support so please don't go around spreading FUD. They are the biggest single contributor to the kernel and pay for some of the best kernel hackers alive. We may all have this dream of everything OSS and being free... the truth is that at scales this large it'd all fall to hell without serious money behind it. This is why we need big companies with billions of dollars like Red Hat, IBM and Sun to aid in OSS. Out of those companies though, Red Hat is the most critical because even though they aren't the largest, they have the most motivation to make linux successful. If linux fails, Sun and IBM shift to other markets, no big deal, but Red Hat's whole business is linux so they have every reason to ensure its success.
Regards,
Steve

Light on details

[93 Escort Wagon]

I RTFA, but still have questions...

Many posters assume that Dell has done some optimization / tuning / development. But the article says bubkis about that. Did Dell do any work so that things are guaranteed to run smoothly? E.g., is the WiFi support 802.11g, or is it just some old out-of-date 802.11b chipset? Does the power management, in particular sleep / standby mode, consistently work even with X11?

Seriously, if any of you know the answers (and aren't just presupposing one way or the other) let us know!

What's the problem?

[FishandChips]

This sounds excellent news. Yes it might be a ploy to give Dell more traction with Microsoft, but there again it might be sincere. It also goes to show that you don't have to be SuSE or Red Hat to score well, either. Mandriva has very firm markets in France and Brazil and in fact could make a very good living if it never went all that far outside them. This too shows that you don't have to take on the world to succeed in Linux, just do what you know as well as you can. By trying to span the world and appeal to everyone, SuSE and Red Hat might end up by appealing to no one.

yeah, but where?

[yagu]

Okay, I took the bait. Nasty hook marks in my mouth now.

If they're serious about this, how come when doing a search for linux in their "search all dell" option on their home page, I get no results around this new offering? If they were really proud of this and really intended to sell it it'd be nice if they made a bit more noise about it. This feels like PR.

Re:So we know how it all works then ....

[Henry V .009]

Yeah, damn Microsoft for making software that just works without forcing the user to read the manual or learn anything.

The fact is that half the population has a sub-100 IQ. Those people will never grasp Linux in its current form. The solution is certainly not telling them to go and learn something -- they went through years of schooling without managing that. The solution is making software that an idiot can use and making software that an idiot can't break. Microsoft has done the first of these. Linux fails at both.

What about US customers

[beforewisdom]

I will be impressed when gnu/linux comes preinstalled on computers in the US.

Re:Maybe desktop Linux will just always be niche

[rtb61]

It is all about simplifying training. You want to provide the majority of people with an operating system/desktop that they can start to learn in kindergarten and then continue add to that knowledge as they progress through school. After they have left school you want them to be readily able to deploy that knowledge in the work place. It would also be nice if they can use the knowledge at home as well.

You do not want to have to keep paying for that opportunity for the rest of your digital life on an annual basis. Microsoft has proven time and time again that it can not be trusted with that responsibility (they actually really do lie, cheat and steal) profit and ego are their only motivations.

Anything like this needs to be based upon some kind of community based open standards free of licence fee for the mutual benefit of all. Let alone burying it with coporate crap just to achieve a lock in.

Penguinistas are actually going way out of their way to try and achieve this because they know and understand the benefit that this will bring to the greater community (and yes, we also knew the kind of marketing driven vilification we would end up receiving from a particular corporation M$=B$, you know what it stands for, not because of what we have done but but because what they have done).

We actually do want users to be happy little campers, we really do care. Believe it or not folks Linux is all about people not computers.

Re:Tomorow's News:

[mhearne]

You can open and edit any MS Office document with OpenOffice, which comes with the distribution. You can also save any OpenOffice document as a MS Office document - we've been doing this for years, I surprised that so few Windows users were aware of it.

We can also listen to Windows media with MPlayer or Kaffiene and create .pdf files without Acrobat. This isn't new.

Adobe, Real, and Macromedia all produce plugins for Mozilla, Firefox and Konqueror.

Basically, the only thing that Windows can do that Linux can't is get viruses and crash.

Michael

Re:Soon to change...

[gordgekko]

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.

That's a little like saying having sex with someone who has herpes is usually safe. It's true...it usually is...until it isn't. Don't get me wrong, I like OO but it does have some problems opening Office files, problems that will truly screw over some people who need those files opened properly. You and me may be able to deal with it but Joe, Jane and Aunt Millie won't dig it.