Huge Linux Desktop Deals Get HP Thinking

An anonymous reader notes an article in CRN about HP recently cutting deals for multi-thousands of Linux desktops. With all the talk about whether Dell will offer pre-installed desktop Linux any time soon, in the end HP may beat them to that particular punch.

Comments

as a former employee

[Anonymous Coward]

as a former employee I can say Linux is quite big within HP itself... they have a large business unit (including R&D for drivers and several F/OSS applications) purely for Linux. They also have great management tools for providing applications and patches/updates to all desktop users, including Linux desktops. This is probably tested well enough to consider rolling it out to customers now. Within HP you can choose whether you want to run Linux or Windows, although they will only support certain distros (forgot which ones, I suspect they were SuSE and Fedora, although there is strong (user)support for Debian as well) with their managment tool.

HP's got the clout

[yog]

HP's stock is up--take a look at their chart (HPQ). They have a market capitalization of $109 billion, they have surpassed Dell as a supplier of desktops, and they have new stable management (post-Fiorella) in place.

It takes clout to stand up to Microsoft. Smaller companies have little choice but to toe the Microsoft line and act as Windows pimps for their Redmond masters, but the huge players--IBM, HP, and Dell (if Dell had any backbone) can push back a bit, even though they still have to continue to sit at Microsoft's table.

Microsoft stumbled with Vista; they have insisted on replacing XP on all new machines. I couldn't even buy a Dell laptop with XP a couple of weeks ago--have some specialized software that still doesn't run on Vista--had to find one from HP. Vista is late and has problems and Linux is looking better and better.

In the end, it is a combination of market demand, linux readiness, and corporate clout that will break the Microsoft hold on the PC market.

Re:Laptop committment as well

[swillden]

I have Ubuntu running as a VM on my dv9035 with no problems. I do not have Linux running native on any laptop so I can't speak for it but I'm guessing that my VM install would handle just as if it were installed directly on the laptop. Maybe others can verify this or set me straight on the difference.

Nope, it doesn't run the same in a VM as it does running natively on the machine. For much of the hardware -- basically anything except USB -- the "hypervisor" (VMWare or what have you) provides fake devices to the virtual machine. Your Ubuntu install sees, for example, a VMware-brand network card (mine sees a "VMware accelrated AMD PCNet Adapter"), a VMWare-brand graphics card ("VMware SVGA II"), etc., and talks to those "devices". The hypervisor intercepts the requests from the guest OS, translates them and hands them off to the host OS, which uses its drivers to talk to the real network and video card.

With VMWare, at least, USB devices are potentially handled differently, and direct access to them can be handed to the guest machine, via a faked USB controller. I say potentially, because if the USB device is a USB implementation of another kind of device, like a network card or a serial port, you can also allow the host machine to control the device, and then export the functionality to the guest as just another network or serial interface.