Lenovo Preloading SUSE Linux on ThinkPad

An anonymous reader writes "For years, the holy grail of the Linux desktop has been to get a major computer vendor to commit to preloading a Linux desktop. It's finally happened! Lenovo has made a deal with Novell to preload SUSE Linux 10 on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. Ironically, in June, Lenovo was in hot-water with Linux fans because an executive had said that the company would no longer support Linux on its ThinkPad line. But the company did a quick about-turn. Who knows, maybe Mr. Dell will finally get the message, too?"

Comments

Re:First post

[joshuapurcell]

Lenovo never said that it wouldn't be supporting Linux on its Thinkpad line... it is just as much of a misquote now as it was then. The guy interviewed was a someone who didn't have anything to do with their Thinkpad brand, and was in fact talking about another Lenovo product (although I don't remember what product that was).

Preloaded Lenova

[joshsnow]

If you lived in the UK, you can buy a Lenova/IBM thinkpad with linux preloaded already, from here

Re:Preloaded Lenova

[rubinson]

And in the U.S., you've been able to get them for years from EmperorLinux. (That's where I got mine.) That's still qualitatively distinct from having it come from the OEM.

Of course..

[slummy]

IBM owns Novell, Novell owns SUSE. There you have it folks. Good to see GNU/Linux making it's way into the mainstream. Now we've got to get someone pre-loading Slackware.

Re:Of course..

[Sr. Zezinho]

>IBM owns Novell

No, they don't.

Re:Of course..

[(H)elix1]

But many of the IBM'ers in the German labs liked SuSE, so most of the blue stack - DB2, WebSphere, etc - seems to get developed on SuSE and then 'ported' to other distros. RH also works, but it was not as common (from what I've seen) as SuSE. (Yes, Suse now... I know)

Like IBM's Linux T20

[Dr. Evil]

For years, the holy grail of the Linux desktop has been to get a major computer vendor to commit to preloading a Linux desktop. It's finally happened!

2647-L1U. It was done a long time ago.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/quickPa th.do?quickPathEntry=2647-l1u

Re:About time

[cunina]

The top-of-the-line ThinkPads weren't made in China then, nor are they now.

Dell did this 5 years ago

[pyros]

Dell was selling Latitude's with Red Hat pre-installed in the late nineties, lasted until at least 2002, then they canceled it due to lack of customer interest. I hope Lenovo sees better results (they should given how much Linux has improved since then).

Re:Mr. Dell?

[Doctor Memory]

Dell is stating that they will be introducing AMD-based servers "by the end of the year" in their first-quarter financial statement. Should make for great stocking-stuffers for all those little corps this Xmas!

Re:About time

[(H)elix1]

I'm using a t60p right now with SLES 10 on it. Very nice hardware - on par with the t42p, t40p, and t30 before it. The only 'extra' bit of work for the t60 series was they switched over to a SATA HDD and a dual core CPU, which was not an issue but took a bit more work than the IDE drives and single CPU in the earlier laptops. Took forever to get the 2x2G sticks of RAM, but that would be my only beef. The rest is pretty nice kit.

Dell once did offer Linux pre-installed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell once did offer Linux pre-installed on desktop systems - at least through its business sales division. I actually have one (a Dimension 4100 - it's a few years old), and it came with RedHat pre-installed.

Re:Mr. Dell?

[b0s0z0ku]

Who knows, maybe Mr. Dell will finally get the message, too?

Well, they are offering Precision 380 workstations with Redhat Enterprise pre-installed. A step in the right direction.

-b.

Re:Too bad...

[gkitty]

I have an SXGA t22 (made in Mexico by IBM) and a UXGA t43p (designed by IBM, made in China by Lenovo) and to the extent there is any quality difference, the Lenovo wins. Slightly better keyboard, trackpoint, display, case solidity, etc. My t43p is a quantum leap ahead in features and crushes the t22 in CPU, video, memory, disk i/o, battery life etc. I can't help but notice that the t43 scrolls a terminal window faster with the output of a kernel build than the t22 can dump text using 'cat'. (Stupid benchmark I know!) For surfing the web and data entry, there is surprisingly little difference between them and I forget which one I am using.

FWIW, both systems triple boot Windows, Kubuntu, and FreeBSD. I had to do a bunch of minor tweaking to get Linux & BSD working well on the t22 (driver config to keep X from freezing, etc). On the t43 Kubuntu and FreeBSD basically 'work' out of the box but there's a bunch of tweaking the user must do to duplicate the functionality of the generally excellent IBM windows software; things like hibernation and battery-longevity-enhanching behaviour (etc etc ...) are left as an exercise for the user. I don't mind too much but I have better things to do with my time and it takes a while to get it all nearly as good as Windows. (And for the defensive, obviously there are things I prefer about Linux & BSD.)

If anyone believes Lenovo is very different from past Thinkpad factories, your experience is different than mine. My T22 has always been excellent. The T43 is a lot more of the same, just a bit better.

Re:If it's not an Apple ][, it sucks. [NT]

[Nimey]

See Wikipedia's entry. That symbology was on not only the case, but when you booted up the model number (also with ][) would show at the top of the screen. Likewise with my old Apple //c and the IIgs.

There is no cabal.