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Dell To Linux Users — Not So Fast
PetManimal writes to tell us that after all the hubbub over Dell's note about manufacturing Linux-friendly Dells and choosing distros, the company is now telling users not to expect factory-installed Linux laptops and desktops anytime soon. According to the article, Dell says that lining up certification, support, and training will 'take a lot of work.' "The company said today that the note was just about certifying the hardware for being ready to work with Novell SUSE Linux, not an announcement that the computers would be loaded and sold with the operating system in the near future..."
Sadly there is trouble with Dell hardware/software even in their 'big business' server sales. We recently bought $60,000 worth of hardware from them - first time our group bought from Dell, and got machines with closed source, YOU CAN'T RELOAD THE OS WITHOUT OUR PROPRIETARY BINARIES software. After talking to some very responsive people in tech support (and politely explaining that we wouldn't buy Dells again without a test machine) they told us that the problem was the LSI SCSI controller software. Different customer service people (all of whom were polite and seemed to listen) kept asking us about the customer satisfaction rating we gave (2 out of 10), but were unable to dig up a 32-bit version of the OS we wanted to run on our Xeon 1950's. Hadn't been certified. They don't quite get it.