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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?"
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).
Joshua Purcell
I've always loved the IBM Thinkpads but have had doubts about the ability of Lenovo to matain the same quality. I've been looking at getting another Thinkpad, and Lenovo offering a Linux distro may be a good enough reason to try them out. Its not my favorite distro, but its deinetly a great foot in the door for Linux, which is something I can definetly support.
Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
Who knows, maybe Mr. Dell will finally get the message, too?
Dell understands that the hardware business is a commodity business. There's two ways to make money in a commodity business; a. volume, and b. premium marketing
They've mostly maxed out the profit-through-volume business model, so perhaps it would be a good time for them to start positioning certain products in the 'premium' space. Linux enthusiasts are willing to pay more for a product that caters to their tastes. Case in point: the WRT54G-L router from Linksys.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I don't see this as any real big thing. The linux market is still dedicated to the smaller, tenacious demographic (before the flames engulf me I use Ubuntu on my Dell X300). Unless Novell is committed to supporting the operating system in a way more comprehensive manner than M$oft purports to support windows, it's just never going to grow significantly in the short-term. And lets face it, the target truely is the IT admin who's kitting out the workers. A person who's going to order 10's - 100's of units at a time. Now if they're smart, they'll put minimal resources into this until the user base increases enough for a significant cash injection. Be first at the line and capture the tidal wave of change. I really hope they don't just leave the decision to the quarterly bean counters.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
If you lived in the UK, you can buy a Lenova/IBM thinkpad with linux preloaded already, from here
Chinese company will preinstall Linux when American competitors will not. Instead they're sticking with Microsoft, even when the new MS OS won't be good for customers for years. This country is really starting to look stupid from every angle.
--
make install -not war
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.
2647-L1U. It was done a long time ago.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/quickPa th.do?quickPathEntry=2647-l1u
Even if it's not your favoite distro, the drivers will be similar, so installation will still be easier.
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).
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!
Just junk food for thought...
Mr. Dell should not be distributing Linux at all. Even before IBM shipped Linux pre-installed, they at least recognized that when they distribute a GPL covered work they need to also provide a copy of the license.
Dell still publically demostrates they can violate Clause 1 of the GPL by distributing the Linux kernel, busybox and other GPL works without providing a copy of the GPL. They admitted that adding the GPL to the tar ball would be cheap, easy and something they are required by the license to do and yet three years later they still have choosen not to do it.
Btw, this is just one of many examples of Dell violating the GPL over and over again.
You know, the timing of that makes me wonder. I don't think that it is outside the realm of possibility that Dell and Intel have been talking about the future. It wouldn't suprise me if Intel went to Dell and said:
"Hey, we've got some server processors coming out at the end of 2006 [Core 2 Duo based Xeons] that will kick the crap out of the Opteron's. Why don't you announce support for AMD based servers around that same time. People will think you're finally going to do it, but once they see how fast our stuff is, nobody will actually buy an AMD server. It'll prop up the hopes of AMD and their fanboys, then Wham! AMD gets nothing, and you get to have another solid excuse for never again threatening to carry AMD products. You will of course get an extra discount on Intel products for going along with this..."
I'm sure it was a little more subtle than that, but the gist may have been the same.
Then again, what the heck do I know?
ender-
Nothing to see here
I wonder if the price of that laptop will come down since there won't be a cost of licensing any Windows products. Or will they keep it up and pocket the extra profit.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
But the advantage with preloading Linux is that you know that since the preloaded distro worked, your distro of choice will presumably be gotten to work as well. You even have a working model to examine.
I know I'd rather start from a SuSE laptop, even if I didn't want to run SuSE than from a random Windows one.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
This said, I am now sure that they (Novell) have been planning on supporting the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad(s) for a quite some time...
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Novell employees are required to use SLED as their primary desktop. The majority of Novell employees have ThinkPad laptops (T42 and T43s). I imagine the T60p will now be the new Novell employee laptop.
I'm also hoping this extends to over ThinkPads in some form. I have the T60 (similar but an ATI graphics adapter) and would like some of these features when I run SLED 10. I'm particularly interested in getting power management similar to what we get in Windows, with full suspend mode support, better special key support, etc.
-- Of course I'm paranoid. I'm a sysadmin.
Maybe Dell will also realize that a lot of us are pissed off that they
have stopped "supporting" FreeBSD on their servers.
It's not on all models. The biggest problem they have is that they've got magic tags in the BIOS that XP sees and uses to allow an OEM install intended for Dell machines to go on without plugging in the CD key on the labels they're sticking on the machines. They've got to make a "special" version of the machines they're offering no XP preinstall on that doesn't HAVE this magic key to "prevent piracy", especially since they've apparently caught at least three major businesses cheating on licenses this way in the past. The same goes for at least HPaq (I didn't need to key in the license when I re-imaged my laptop for a small XP partition for my wife's benefit and put Linux (Then Mandriva, now FC5 x86-64 on it...) on.
Blame their wishing for an "easier" way of things for the customer- I blame them for doing something silly that ties them even tighter
than ever to Microsoft that honestly wasn't something that was relevant save for the fact that the damn thing needs regular re-installs
to be of any use to anyone.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Well, they are offering Precision 380 workstations with Redhat Enterprise pre-installed. A step in the right direction.
-b.
Maybe you can tell me WTF this "Apple ][" symbology is. It was the second Apple model, right? Isn't it a Roman 2, i.e. II? So is this just a silly word game to show who are the true Illuminati, like "unixen", etc?
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.
...) 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.)
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
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.
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.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem