Slashdot Mirror
Michael Dell Using Ubuntu Linux At Home
whoever57 sends us a link from the Dell site noting that Michael Dell is using Ubuntu Linux at home (7.04, Feisty Fawn) on a Precision M90 laptop loaded with Openoffice.org and Evolution. If one were betting on which distro Dell will eventually ship pre-installed, this factoid might be food for thought. Oh, and Micheal Dell's gaming system uses XP Media Center edition.
I wonder if he can get it without the MS tax?
I can't even imagine why one person would want five PCs.
How much time does he spend applying patches and updating software? Transferring data?
THREE different laptops? Doesn't he realize that the whole appeal of a laptop is that you can take it with you wherever you go?
No, you are missing the point. He had to use the monster PCs for the ones running vista just to get it on the web. The Ubuntu lappy runs fine without a supercharger...
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
Although it's not officially announced yet, the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn torrents are live:
Desktop i386
Desktop AMD64
Server i386
Server AMD64
The more exotic torrents (and the directly downloadable ISOs) can be found at the official release site but I thought we'd try to save their servers a bit of pain and heartache.
Just made a living out of selling cheap windows boxes. You seriously think the owners of Mc.D. eat the burgers themselfes aswell? ;-)
Who are you to say that Ubuntu is aimed "too much" at the home user? Did you ever think that maybe that's who they're targeting? Every other Linux distribution isn't aimed at all at any variation of a home/average user. The folks at Ubuntu are probably going "gee, duh. Maybe we should make a distribution that you can use without having to have 6 years of sysadmin experience" You're doing the right thing by using a distribution you prefer. It's just a little off base to say that Ubuntu's distribution is aimed "too much" toward home users. Or do you prefer the days when you had to be a computer geek in order to use a computer?
I hate to feed the rumors, but what other distro would they possibly use ? I don't know of any other that pulls off the user experience schmoozing as cleanly as Ubuntu, seeing as it's one of their main goals. As funny as it would be to toss a Gentoo boot disc in the box and watch the call center agents as they commit suicide one after another:
Joe - " I setup Portage to run off a CDB backend, and now my metadata is corrupt. Fix my box, bitch!"
Kerpal - " Ok, sir, please turn off the computer and remove the power cord for 2 minutes. "
Joe - " No, f*** you that won't fix it. I need a tarball of this and that, and a custom shell script to reindex those..."
Kerpal - " Ok, sir, I am going to put you on hold... (hold music) AAAAAAAAAH *BOOM* *SPLAT* *CLICK*"
Ultimately they want a nice easy distro to appeal to the masses, because that's the business they're in. I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a nice idiot-proof restore CD as well, because the expensive part is training the thousands of tech support people worldwide. Having them pop in a restore disc is an easy way to deal with it, because ultimately that's what a lot of techs end up doing when Windows acts up too... just blow it away and start over. That's how they're trained. Advanced software troubleshooting is a luxury billed by the hour, not covered by the puny hardware warranty.
-Billco, Fnarg.com