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Linux Preinstalled Dell Available Soon
An anonymous reader writes "According to a BetaNews article,
Dell confirmed on Wednesday plans to offer Linux pre-installed on select desktop and notebook systems, beyond its current Linux-based servers and Precision workstations.
No specific time frame was given for the expanded Linux plans, although the company said in a blog posting that it will provide an update in the coming weeks regarding the effort. It will detail 'information on which systems we will offer, our testing and certification efforts, and the Linux distribution(s) that will be available,' Dell said, adding that, 'The countdown begins today.'"
Dell Australia (actually, malaysia or wherever they are outsourcing to) denied me my attempted return of my vista license. I had not accepted the EULA that comes up when you start the notebook for the first time.
I asked them to send me the EULA after they denied me on the phone (there was no comprehension of the issue), this is the response I received:
As per our conversation, we are unable to refund or exchange the Microsoft Windows Vista Operating System as the license is already tied to your computer, service tag #: BLAHBLAH
And any exchange or refund of the license would be in breach of licensing agreement.
Microsoft Vista is a good platform where technology is moving forwards and the markets are now gearing towards Microsoft Windows Vista.
Any advice or let it go? - how amusing is that final sentence!
If I put you in a room and tell you to answer questions in chinese, when you don't speak a word of chinese, but I give you these nifty books which contain a whole lot of rules that you can follow to translate one chinese character into another chinese character, which result in you producing the right answers, can you, or the room, or you and the room, be considered to "understand" chinese?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Lack of demand. Lets admit it, the vast majority of people who want to run linux build their own computers, no? Now that linux is becoming an office workstation option for at least a reasonable number of goverment and private sector workplaces, it becomes feasable for dell to keep a full time linux specialist on tech staff. They aren't really trying to sell this stuff to geeks, this is strictly aimed at the office.
Two points here:
* I've played with a LOT of distros looking for one that can be supported among low-tech-level end users. Feisty, even in Beta, is the best I've seen. It has a hell of a lot of potential.
* What are the alternatives? They could go with a commercial distro like Red Hat, Linspire or Suse, but that means more OS costs than a base Vista install. If they do one of the free variants of those (Fedora or OpenSuse) there are stability issues - trust me, I *loved* Fedora Core 6 and if it was just for my personal use, I'd have stuck with it, but the autoinstaller sometimes loads stupid stuff. OpenSuse 10.2 was more stable but the European repositories were often down. I haven't tried Freespire but those magic numbers "1.0" for a version don't inspire confidence. That leaves what, Mepis as a low-end commercial distro? How much support is there for Mepis as opposed to Ubuntu?
Pretty much every Linux geek out there has at least some experience with Ubuntu at this point. That alone is reason to consider Ubuntu. Canonical is going to want this deal to go down, bad. Ubuntu is almost unique as being a free-to-download distro that still has a corporate development base.
My personal favorite distro is actually Zenwalk. Fast as hell Slackware fork with basically all the hard stuff already done. Awesome distro, but...just a few too many minor glitches to load it on "Grandma Millie's" P4 box and expect not to get panic phone calls once a week or so.
It's not us geeks that are the acid test for Linux, it's "Grandma Millie". Like a lot of my fellow political activists who are being hammered by Windows malware. I'm sick of doing bughunts for these folk when they get infested or zombified, flat fed up, and I can't see any better Linux alternative than Ubuntu.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No. There are PLENTY of Windows based companies with that same graph in the first half of the decade - and Linux companies, Internet companies, etc. This one is even more interesting - note that each company in that one has had one split since 2000.
Sorry, but your theory holds no juice.
(Hint: Next time, make a point... THEN substantiate it with graphs & pictures)
This isn't the first time Dell offered Linux. The last time they made a half-hearted effort then made a big show of saying no one wanted it. The Linux machines were almost impossible to find on their web site, didn't have any support options and they charged more for not putting Windows on the box. Some test.
So I'm wondering if this is an actual effort to offer Linux boxes or another PR stunt? I don't trust Dell any farther than I can pee into a hurricane. They speak with the stench of Redmond on their lips.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It should eat significant market share as people with older Win98 boxes are forced to upgrade to *something* due to lack of ongoing security support.
I see this argument all the time. I'm not saying that there aren't tons of people still on Win98. The problem is, it's working for them and the need to upgrade has been there since the XP days.
Now, even if these people would think that upgrading to Ubuntu is a viable option (versus just keeping Windows 98, which works fine for them! Those aren't upgrade freaks like we are. Wait, I'm not an upgrade freak. I used Win2K exclusively up to fall 2005!), there still is a problem. The problem is that the hardware is hardly apt to run a distribution like Ubuntu. Win98-era PC's are in the range of P-III machines, most of them coming initially between 64 and 256 Meg RAM. Now a P-III with 256Meg with Ubuntu will probably work, but those are the machines that were extremely high-end back in the day. Normal people don't shop the high-end. Don't forget that back in those days, people that knew stuff about computers would double the amount of RAM in standard machines because it wasn't really enough. (Heck, I still do that these days!) The people that were knowledgeable back then, are most definitely not running Win98 anymore.
Just recently I fixed a Thinkpad E600 for a friend, which is a P-II 300MHz or so with 128Meg RAM (which I found astonishingly high for that class of machine. It turned out that it came form a stock sale from a bank) Ubuntu wouldn't even install: not enough RAM. I temporary exchanged the 2x64Meg sticks with 2x256Meg sticks and I could install Ubuntu and use it just fine. After installation, I put in back the original 2x64Meg and Ubuntu worked from the harddisk. Slow, but it worked.... I'd hate to use it everyday. Still, I gave it back like that because I'm not giving away 2x256Meg RAM...
All the current Win98 machines run fine on Win98, but they will be memory starved on any operating system that is considered "more modern" (and that includes XP) The fact that these typically can have damned slow disks, won't help when swapping.
I have one P-III 550MHz with 512Meg RAM running Windows XP which I refurbished for my mother in law. That one runs really fine.... However, the only thing that is original in that machine is the motherboard, the floppy and the case. It will probably run Ubuntu fine too, but it isn't a typical Win98-era machine anymore.
I know it's bad form to respond to sigs, but you can install Debian (and Ubuntu) .deb packages on Slackware reasonably easily. First, use ar to extract the files from the .deb. You will get three files. The first, "debian-binary" can safely be ignored (all it contains is a version number to help the Debian packaging utilities). The second, "control.tar.gz" contains various scripts for pre- and post- installation and removal operations, and dependency-control information. These may be worth a butchers but probably can be ignored. Lastly there is "data.tar.gz" which, to all intents and purposes, is identical to a Slackware package. That is to say, it is a binary tarball which can just be unpacked straight into the root directory.
.tar.gz file. And if it swears blind you're missing something that you're convinced you've got, you're most probably missing the corresponding -dev or -devel package. Just install the missing package from source (and, if it's a library, remember to run ldconfig straight afterward).
Watch out, though, for incompatibilities between Debian's and Slackware's default file layouts.
In general, if you're ever installing anything that wasn't packaged by your distribution, it's always best to install it from the source
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I wonder about suv4x4. [grin] :P
Ok, good. SUV matches the initials of my name, I don't drive a SUV, I drive a biodegradable bike that farts plant seeds, as I already pointed out in another post regarding powerful radars and confused whales.
I'm assuming you're talkig about the beta version (feisty/7.04).
In a development release, I would expect huge bugs like yours on occasion.
So far, I've seen a total of 1 (one) broken app, and that's democracyplayer, which I am currently running around dredging up the bugs in, and hopefully we'll have a working package by release.
And though MP3 isin't installed by default, Feisty will set the codecs up the first time you try a MP3
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
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Having worked in a call center I would disagree. You either use the same support staff and just train them on both systems or you farm it out based on volume. Farming it out doesn't even have to be to India, there are companies that would love to take on the burden of training staff to handle support calls for Dell. Bellsouth does this, if you are calling about your internet connection you are probably actually talking to a company called CallTech.
You give support staff maybe as much as a week of training. Then sit in front of computers with a big database with a search engine interface. Most of that staff knows nothing about the systems or the software they just relay on their database with step by step instructions. You have a higher level of support that knows a thing or two and they submit updates when the answer isn't in the database. A third small team reviews those updates and rewrites them in step-by-step instructions before actually merging them into the database.
This process scales with volume. The more calls you handle the more staff/lines and overhead you have. If they have substantial volume they will probably farm it out for $x/call if they have low volume they will pick a subset of their current staff and give them a one week course on Linux. Linux calls will then be routed to one of those reps.