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Lenovo to Sell, Support Linux on ThinkPads
Pengo writes "Lenovo has announced that they will begin selling T-series ThinkPads with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 pre-installed beginning sometime during the fourth quarter. In addition to supplying the hardware support, Lenovo will also handle OS support for ThinkPad customers, with Novell providing software updates. 'Unlike Dell, which has targeted its Linux offering primarily at the enthusiast community, Lenovo's SLED laptops are targeted at the enterprise. Whether they are running Ubuntu, SLED, or some other distribution, the availability of Linux pre-installation from mainstream vendors increases the visibility of the operating system and gives component makers an incentive to provide better Linux drivers and hardware support. If Lenovo is willing to collaborate with the Linux development community to improve the Linux laptop user experience, it will be a big win for all Linux users, not just the ones who buy laptops from Lenovo.'"
2007 is the year of Linux on the desktop!
That really undercuts the "but does it run Linux" question.
They announced this exactly a year ago!
Maybe they won't make it specifically for the enthusiast, but will they include the bells/whistles/extra memory that Windows users get for free/reduced cost?
If a million people jumped off a cliff, it'd only be a short time until I landed in a nice soft mountain of bodies.
you want to support Microsoft and their deal with Novell. May I suggest a boycott?
After 10 years of driving an Open I am now driving a Nissan. I am pleasing with it, but I be damned if i care if Nissan is worldwide being adopted as the cure of cancer or not. I just drive my damn Nissan and don't care if my neighbor drive a Volvo or hate japanese cars....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
You know, China's house blend
I sense another 600 "year of the linux desktop" articles in the works.
I'm particularly excited about Lenovo handling the OS support themselves, I've owned a thinkpad for several years now and have always had amazingly prompt and effective support from them... My optical drive's tray broke a couple weeks ago, and it took them exactly 4 days to get it fixed from picking up the phone to getting the laptop back in full working order.
Let's hope they can de-complexify SUSE's YAST. Few things could make Linux look more complex to fresh eyes.
Well I remember not too long ago about how Lenovo would not install or support Linux. And the first comment on that page, "They'll come crawling back to us when Vista turns out to be a flop."
Ha.
My gut reaction is that Vista's poor reception helped make this happen. Partly because of poor customer demand, and partly because it forced Lenovo and Dell to look elsewhere for product differentiation.
Am I right?
the availability of Linux pre-installation from mainstream vendors increases the visibility of the operating system and gives component makers an incentive to provide better Linux drivers and hardware support.
That only holds true if vendors can write a single driver for Linux. If they have to write five different Linux drivers, they're going to scoff.
But it's okay that they have to support drivers for five different versions of Windows, that's no problem. But I guarantee they'll get all pissy pants if they have to support more than one distro of Linux.
I actually thinks this plays into MSFT's hand.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
too bad it's Suse, I would've preferred Ubuntu or Debian, at least it allows for easy upgrades and I think it would leave a better impression of Linux to newbies.
but I guess it doesn't really matter to me, I'm just happy if I can avoid the MS tax and get better hardware support, I'll reinstall it anyway.
The only question left to me now is whether I buy a macbook or a thinkpad, tough choice!
/* No Comment */
Flop or not, most places are still pushing Vista because that is what Microsoft tells them to do. Those that also offer XP have a differentiator.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No one should support those particular Linux vendors who assist Microsoft in their efforts to deceptively and in bad faith portray Free Software as illegal. Lenovo - How about some Red Hat or Ubuntu offerings?
On the positive side, one can argue that for a Free Software user it's better to pay for Novell's product than Microsoft's, because at least the hardware is more likely going to be compatible with other, more respectable Linux distributions.
A good step forward, but there is much room for improvement.
I wonder if improved support under Linux for the sensors in IBM/Lenovo laptops will come from this?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Three cheers for Lenovo!
That's all I have to say.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
With all this Linux support lately I wonder what MS is thinking. What will they do for the next OS. Update the the NT system W2k/XP? Which would be nice. They could be building a Linux based system and introduce it just when Linux is supported by a few more big manufacturers.
This could get them quite a few customers who want to switch to Linux because they have been hearing about how good it is from their friends/co-workers but are too afraid to go away from Windows. Now here comes a MS Linux distro with full MS support to put away those OS switch fears and still manage to keep the customer on the MS side.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Ok so we've all been saying... this year is time for Linux on the desktop, maybe we're finally here.
A combination of Windows Vista flunking and not meeting the needs of consumers (compared to Windows XP), the business requirement to bring down prices (no Windows tax) so their range of laptops can be more competitive with in the market their targeting (basically small businesses and students) means that Linux is starting to become a possibility, considering Ubuntu is often said to be easier to use than Windows XP.
Now, can you seriously consider hardware vendors like Lenovo pushing laptops with Vista pre-installed when they know battery life descreased and the minimum required specs will be seriously increased, driving up the base cost of the machine.
Yeah, I can see where these people are coming from, it's a pure business decision with the side effect of getting the Linux geeks on your side.
Some may deride Novell for their deal with Microsoft, but Lenovo is targeting the corporate world, not OS Holy War advocates. In the corporate world, big businesses want certainty, even in the face of possibly-baseless claims. IMHO, the two most important places to target with Linux are businesses and schools. People will tend to use at home what they are around at school or work. Not all, but most. Familiarity breeds sales. Regarding schools, target the K-12 school systems.
Dell, HP/Compaq, Lenovo/IBM...these are the big three that the Linux community needs to really push the off-the-shelf sale. The sales of these three dwarf all of the rest of the competition.
Thus, I say bring it on, Lenovo! Soon, all of the other 1st and 2nd tier vendors will fall into the new order of the world or risk being left behind.
Bearded Dragon
I've been looking forward to this!
Way to go Lenovo!
You know, my old Apple laser printer doesn't work with my Windows XP Thinkpad. Should I call Lenovo and complain? Also, my Atari 2600 Joystick doesn't work either. What a defect!
Or maybe printers that require Windows XP... require Windows XP. There's no reason for this to be a problem. If you're too dumb to figure out what's not compatible before purchase, then buy a Mac or WebTV or something easy like that.
I'm pretty sure the wifi adaptor built in to the laptop will work, though.
Not that we need another car analogy but since you brought up... You have to admit it is nice that you can purchase tires for your Nissan or your neighbor's Volvo from multiple tire companies. If one of these companies is having quality issues you can switch to a different brand. Isn't that special? Now if the operating system on your laptop runs into quality issues wouldn't it also be nice to switch to a different company? Choice is always in the best interest of the consumer.
What would be really fabulous -- and I've been waiting for this day for five years or more,m now - is the day the first mainstream vendor starts selling OpenBSD-powered machines. That will show a genuine commitment to open standards and Freedom. Too many corporates are jumping on the Linux bandwagon thinking they can happily sell black-box software (or hardware) that they write Linux drivers or kernel modules for, and just take the money -- indeed that doesn't look like a bad strategey -- but supporting OpenBSD will reveal an actual interest in Freedom, as opposted to just making as much money as possible. (yes, yes, I know what you're thinking, spare me ok... )
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
You might be trying to be funny, but you're a fucking moron, please for the good of humanity, kill yourself... now!
[what?]
I recently purchased an X61 and I've been happy running Linux on it. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody who isn't very familiar with Linux already.
First of all, Thinkpads don't come with install media. You can make your own, but that's sort of hard if you bought a slimline model like the X61 without a CD drive. The tech support people were ultimately not helpful. They were willing to waive the $40 media fee (Lenovo, WTF?) because my computer doesn't have a disk drive, but it was "too new" for my warranty to be in their database (WTF?) and they couldn't send me the disks.
Still, as long as I didn't touch their initial partition, I reasoned, I could still get back to a factory install. Windows was only a last resort if I couldn't get Linux on there anyway.
The SATA controller had to be put in compatibility mode, unsurprisingly. The wireless worked in Ubuntu when I backported the Gutsy kernel, but the screen brightness control stoped working with the Gutsy kernel. So I tried Fedora 7.
In Fedora 7 (32 bit version), wireless worked out of the box once all the kernel updates were installed (mostly worked that is -- reboot and "modprobe -r iwl4965; modprobe iwl4965" often).
I can't get sound working even with the CVS copy of the "patch_analog.c" from alsa cvs copied into the alsa driver source. Others have had more success with this.
Suspend (often) works after following the instructions for a T61 linked from here. Of course, 50% of the time the machine will crash coming out of suspend, so I'm going to try the instructions here and see how it goes.
I haven't even tried to get all the keyboard function buttons working.
I don't want to pay the Novell tax any more than I want to pay the Microsoft tax, ESPECIALLY since they are bedfellows. I have been running Fedora on my Thinkpad for years and would love to get a new one but I am not going to run Microsoft OR Novell OSs on it. They don't have to support it either so take that support cost off the price as well and we'll both be happy.
seriously--- kde was a lot of features that are perfect for desktop users. It is a *very* powerful desktop environment. kparts, widgets, dcop scripting, etc allow programs to work together in ways they simply can't in a gnome/windows/osx environment. konqueror with its kioslaves, allowing you to ftp, sftp, ssh, http, nfs, smb, etc all from one application is a damn powerful application. Its disappointing that dell, and now lenovo are standardizing on a gnome desktop. :(
2007 is much more the year of gnu/linux than it is the year of Vista. First Dell, now Lenovo. Acer might soon decide their Singapore gnu/linux laptop has a market in the UK and US after all. That would leave HP as the only one of the big four desktop makers who don't sell models with gnu/linux. Driver support for Linux is already good but vendor demand is going to make it better, which is why M$ has done everyting in their power to keep vendors from doing this. Vista is a flop and no one is making money off the upgrade train anymore, so M$ has nothing to offer, vendors have nothing to lose and the M$ death spiral is on.
Death spiral? Yep. They did not have the resources to make Vista modern or even functional. Low sales of Vista have flatlined their revenue, so they will never have the resources to recover. Vendors are defecting and that lowers the likely hood that Vista will ever be ready and reduces their ability to sabotage free software with bogus non standards.
The non free way has finally failed. This will be good for everyone but M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What so with the other story about IIS creeping in on Apache's market share, and this story with Lenova taking Linux on the Desktop... does this mean Windows is taking over the server and Linux taking over the desktop (flamebait) I guess it was a matter of time... Windows always wanted to be more like Linux on the server and Linux wanted to be more like Windows on the desktop.
It's all about differentiating product. After a decade of mono-culture in the OEM world commoditization happened, and the OEMs suffered excruciatingly low profit margins as a result.
With Vista sales at a blisteringly mediocre pace and consumers increasingly met with nearly identical machines at identical prices from identical companies with identically poor support where else can the OEMs turn?
We've seen M. Dell mention publicly that he would distribute OS X if he could, and Apple will never do that. Linux provides for the utmost extreme example of potential product differentiation at a nominal cost to the OEM. Most of them will take differing sides in the Flavor-of-the-month club. Dell has chosen Ubuntu, Lenovo has chosen Suse. Who will HP pick? Madriva or Fedora maybe. The OEMs want to sell machines, they need to find new markets and differentiate their products. This is the beginning of a time travelling exercise to about 1986 when CP/M, Commodore's Amiga, and DOS were but a few of the possible business and consumer choices out there. MS did some great things in introducing a common platform for development and such, but I think that world+dog realizes that homogeneous computing has more downsides than ups.
load "$",8,1
Linux has been running flawlessly (as far as I can tell) on my Thinkpad T40 ever since I got it, and also on my 600E before that. Go figure.
This is great if you want to support Microsoft and their deal with Novell. May I suggest a boycott?
It would be more productive to ask for the distribution of your choice and purchase only models known to work with that distro. I've yet to go wrong with a used Thinkpad but I would not trust a vendor supplied distro anyway. If it came with nifty tweaks, I would look at them and duplicate the setting, but change the binaries out.
The choice corporate customers have is Novel or Vista. If they chose Novel, it won't be long before vendors get smart and cut M$ out of the deal. GPL 3 has extinguished the patent threat, so the Novel deal is dead in the water anyway. It's not like it really provided and of the promised compatibility, so the extra cost is all waste and not even Novel will like it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In my old 600E (now property of my father in law) linux ran well. But without energy saving functions.
Let's hope they support their fingerprint readers for biometric authentication.
libertarian: (n) socially liberal, financially conservative; neither left, nor right.
At the least, it looks like Linux is becoming viable for the desktop. One of the challenges that Be Inc. faced with their BeOS was that they could not get any mainstream distributor to ship it (this was largely due to the secret contract that Microsoft forced OEMs to sign). Linux appears to have cleared this hurdle with multiple vendors supporting it and even more on the way. It probably won't see the popularity of Mac OS X any time soon, let alone compete with Windows, but it now has the potential to do so.
Areas where there needs to be improvement:
- Advanced file system (i.e., better than FAT32) that Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux understand.
- Major vendors shipping and supporting multi-boot systems. Even better if each OS can run the other(s) in a VM out of the box.
The easier it is for Linux and Windows to interoperate, the faster Linux's market share will grow.
That's all just market inertia.
Take a stream of Dells, remove the XP OEM installs from them and insert Vista OEM installs.
That's just more of the same.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This can only mean one thing! ATi/AMD will finally get its' head out of its ass and fix the drivers. First Dell is putting pressure on ATi and now with Lenovo selling Linux laptops with all those ATi chips there is serious pressure to fix the damn things.
I was a die-hard ATi fan starting with VGA Wonder-XL(ISA) until the Radeon 8500(PCI) series. After owning every generation of All-In-Wonder that they produced and never enjoying the usage of those products to the extent that was possible.
I am now in the market for a laptop, and the number of Nvidia laptops is slim. I hope this will encourage ATi to fix the damn things.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I'm all for open source to succeed, but you are insane. Whoever modded you up should be taken out and shot.
this is way to go! soon ppl will realize linux importance
So now they are claiming 60 million by the end of June? That would make 20 million coppies sold in June alone because they were boasting 40 million in May. Given that the market is on the order of 230 million a year, and most people don't want Vista, it's unlikely that many desktops were sold and less likely they all had Vista.
If things were really rosy for M$, you would not see systems with gnu/linux. That you do signals the end of the M$ monopoly.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'll prefer to take Microsoft's word of how many sales they made over some random dudes on the internet, being that Microsoft is a public company and making false financial reports is a pretty serious legal offense.
A few years ago, IBM (Lenovo's Thinkpad predecessor) was saying they would convert all of their enterprise desktops to Linux. Never happened. If Lenovo really does start offering SUSE on a T-series, Thinkpad, it will be a big deal that could start a cascade of non-US desktops to Linux. No wonder, M$ just started offering cut-rate Vista in China. M$ knows how important this is so, though, so the likely outcome is that Microsoft will cut a sweetheart deal with Lenovo and Lenovo will quietly shelve their SUSE plans.
Lenovo's quality of Linux support has gone downhill drastically ever since IBM seems to be out of the loop in terms of software development. While all parts of the hardware are officially and unsurprisingly supported, the firmware of recent models has shown to ignore Linux as an alternative OS.
I have been superhappy with my 2 year old R51 until the backlight went dead, which I took as a sign to get a slimmer, less weighty and faster machine and having been so happy with the unquirky Linux support of the R51, I went for a T60 (and bought my GF an X60 two months before that).
Both the T60 and the X60 have problems with S2RAM, unreliable wireless support, short battery lifetime. Add to that a non functioning WiFi-LED, no switchable external monitor support, no backlight adjustment with the Fn-keys, those sucky extra Windows keys and other minor stuff that I can't or don't want to think of right now.
IBM-Thinkpads have been the best and safest recommendation for any Linux user for years. Go to any hacker conference and you'll see around 70% of all notebooks being Thinkpads with Linux and everyone was happy to recommend TPs as the ultimate Linux notebook. Not anymore. Within two years Lenovo has managed to piss Linux users off massively and very few people these days would actually recommend recent TPs as the optimal Linux laptop solution.
Sad, very sad.
The T60 is a beautiful machine, but running Linux on it as I have been used to in the last couple of years is a big pain in the ass. Both my old Inspiron 8200 and the R51 were better Linux machines in every respect, since all the hardware was supported out of the box and ran as expected. I have had the T60 for three weeks now and I have invested an unproportionally large amount of time to get it working to such an extent that it is not completely unusable anymore. It took me reading all available material on fellow T60 users, subscribing to the Linux Thinkpad mailing list and endless hours of fiddling with a development version of Ubuntu.
The difference between IBM and Linux is simple: IBM cared for Linux and be it only in the way of making sure that its employers wouldn't encounter any unforeseen problem during the transition of IBM's corporate migration to Linux.
I hereby solemnly swear to never buy a Thunkpad again and certainly not recommend any Thinkpad to potential users, unless Lenovo decides to migrate its corporate infrastructure to Linux and is thus forced to make these bricks at least work with the basic requirements of WiFi-support, battery life identical to Windows, S2RAM and a graphics adaptor that comes out of Suspend (that is, IF it does) without any artifacts left on the screen for the rest of the session.
And, yes, I have made sure to get an Intel graphics chip this time, but to be honest: It was not worth it. I can't see an improvement in battery life, but I am rewarded with worse performance than any ATI or NVIDIA card, artifacts on the display, a crazy hack to make 1440x1050 work (915resolution) at all.
Goodbye Thinkpads, it's been nice to have known you, but it's time to move on, at least if you are a Linux user.
Resources, they had more than enough of. Now things like Skill, Insight, Innovation (the real kind), Design Acumen... those were what they lacked.
I'm not sure M$ can afford to modernize their software base any other way than the way Apple did or even if they have time to do the same anymore. The Linux kernel alone costs $600 million. Other software will cost them plenty and they will have to create many drivers themselves because vendors would give them the finger and more to less restrictive systems until M$'s was a success. This is what's happened to Vista. It would be very difficult for them to make utilities as good as those available in the free software world. The gnu debugger, for example, had the attentions of more than 80 people. Even M$'s billions would go away quickly if they tried to do everything themselves to that kind of quality standard. Apple harvested free software and a lot of community involvement to get themselves into OSX. M$ had it's chance to do the same, but squandered it building digital restrictions instead.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My guess is MS becomes a middleware vendor, with Windows Runtime for Linux, BSD and Mac OS X, which would allow for the use of Windows executables and libraries under those operating systems. A "light" version of this runtime would be bundled with their consumer products, such as Zune store and media management app, any games they sell, MS Office, Windows Media Player, etc., so they can extend the target audience for those services to other operating systems. This is the only move that makes sense for them in a world of increasing OS diversity that can't be crushed through traditional maneuvering... This would also free up their resources to build their nice APIs and developer tools without having to worry about an increasingly commoditized and irrelevant underlying OS. If they do offer their own Posix-compliant OS, I would wager they'd go with a BSD flavor, much as Apple did, so they can control the release of source code with much more granularity.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
I second these sentiments.
Recently I purchased a T61P. When I opened the box and felt it, I thought "This doesn't feel nearly as robust as my old T43." The keyboard felt flimsy. The mouse buttons felt as if they'd break after a few months. The entire chassis felt appropriate for a bargain sub $500 laptop, but not a $1500 Thinkpad. When I booted up Knoppix (I didn't want to accept any windows licenses) the screen looked sub-standard.
So I returned it and bought an Acer laptop for $400 on sale. Lenovo's staff required a bit of convincing to get out of the 15% restocking fee, but they eventually caved. Unfortunately, I had to pay to ship it back to Lenovo's warehouse in the Carolinas. After they received my laptop, it took them two weeks to credit my card.
My $400 Acer has dreadful Linux support (Atheros wireless that doesn't even work with ndiswrapper), the battery life is awful, but the screen looks better. I can forgive a lot for $400...but not $1500.
Lenovo needs to improve their quality, or provide deep discounts. They're doomed if they continue in the direction they're going.
same here ... T42 and older 600x (which I still have and still runs linux flawlessly)
Never try to out-stubborn a cat.
Why is so hard to offer a No OS option??
Ok, right, you are going to offer me Linux but not the one I use nor the one I want to use so you're telling me You gift your money to Microsoft or Novell, choose your favorite...
What's so hard about a No OS option that no company offer this?? WHY?! Why does I have to waste my money on software I will never use?!...
ghostbar page.
I am some what doubtful that IBM will do more than just install Linux on the laptop. I recently purchased a few new laptops and wanted to get some more information about the hardware and they told me to call Linux (do they know that linux isnt a company??) To be able to support Linux and I mean support in the software sense they would need to fire all their current employees which no nothing about it and hire trained Linux profesionals.
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45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The reaction to Vista's poor reception was demand (in literal, not economical sense) to continue selling XP.
Kicking Linux in was reaction to Microsoft ignoring that demand.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
1. Computers cost $300 nowadays, and Linux runs better than other current OSes on them.
2. Apple uses proprietary hardware. Your father had to CHOOSE. You can run Linux right beside Windows. You can run Windows INSIDE Linux. (which now you can do that on an Apple as well, but not back then)
These two facts alone mean that a kid can get his OWN computer for Christmas, or just ask his dad if he can steal 50GB of the 250GB hard drive on the Intel Core2Extreme wind-tunnel he bought because he wanted to make sure that it would live up to his word-processing expectations. And maybe he'll get around to making a home video.
But the point is, the terrain is different, the arguments are different. Joo wrong, dude. Or, joo right, but not right now.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Novell, more than any other company in the world, couldn't have made it clearer to the outside world that they do not ever acknowledge any patent infringement. Ballmer and Microsoft have always said disparaging things about Linux: this is nothing new. It's counter-productive to blame Novell for Microsoft's latest antics.
Lenovo pairing with Novell is really awesome. SUSE Linux Enterprise is the clear leader for Linux desktops in enterprises, so I'm really pleased that they outside world will be getting the best impression straight away.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
i received my compaq presario with linux mandriva pre-installed this saturday. mandriva got the proverbial axe for the simple reason that it was a 32-bit version on a 64-bit sempron. so kubuntu FTW.
granted, i live in brasil, where the pseudo-socialist goverment of pres. lula is giving a push for open software, but still...
go to any super store market (wall mart, extra, carefour, etc.) here in sao paulo and you'll find half a dozen notebooks and/or desktops with some sort of linux from factory. usually R$ 300 cheaper than the very same hardware running windows from factory.
is a nice way to pull pranks... most of the show room machines are kept locked, with a password created by the store people. but of course, these people don't know jack s*#t about the root user, so a quick ctrl+alt+backspace, i'm back to the login prompt, root passwd on HP's machines is usually "mandriva", so there i am, with root access, ready to put some pr0n slideshow for everyone to enjoy... yeah, i'm that evil!
What ? Me, worry ?
Thinkpads are a natural because the hardware compatibility has always been pretty good, right?
I'd rather buy one with MS and install my own flavor than support an "Open Source" company that sells out to MS. I don't want to encourage Linspire or SUSE at all in hopes that others won't follow that slippery slope. Not that I think they will, Linspire did it to get anyone to actually notice them and SUSE is owned by Novell, who has no problem with being closed source anyway.
I doubt MS is making false financial reports, but Microsoft isn't known for letting silly things like legality get in the way of their business plans.
I have a T61 with the nVidia chipset. After installing Gutsy, the latest nVidia drivers, the latest driver snapshot from intellinuxwireless, and the latest ALSA snapshot, my wireless works perfectly, as does sound, suspend works most of the time (it used to occasionally not go to sleep, presumably because something wasn't shutting down, but I *think* the latest 4965 driver snapshot fixed this issue), and it's never failed to resume. Yeah, the SATA controller needs to be run in compatibility mode, but I don't see why that's a big deal. I haven't bothered with hibernation, so I can't speak to that.
:).
Of the things that don't work, or don't work as expected, the first is the brightness controls. If I switch to console, then adjust the brightness, it works fine. But it doesn't work in X, for whatever reason. The second is the battery monitor. I picked up an ultrabay battery, which operates as a second battery which is detected just fine by the Gnome tray application. However, when the second battery runs low (it has the lower capacity), the system gets confused, thinking that my laptop's battery is about to run out (when, in reality, the other battery has ~100% charge left). I had to disable auto-shutdown because the damn thing would put my laptop to sleep!
As for the function keys, the screen brightness buttons *try* to work (ie, the brightness control comes up), but something is broken elsewhere. Other buttons that work fine are the volume controls, screen lock, and sleep. Others I don't think I've tried (or just don't recall
So, overall, a good experience. But it did take some fiddling, so it's not for the faint of heart, just yet.
What does that, if it's true, have to do with the topic at hand?
Microsoft has accidentally legitimized Linux. I think we should leverage that in any way we can. We could embrace Linux on laptops, extend choice of distros, and extinguish Microsoft.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Windows XP worked. There is room to improve things under the bonnet quite a lot, but not in terms of features to add. ... what can they do?
They can get out of the way and let users do what they want. There are tons of features in KDE, Gnome and other desktops that you won't find in Windoze. If M$ won't relinquish their death grip on the internals, the least they can allow is people a choice of Window Managers and make it so the user can chose pieces of each without conflict as happens in the free software world. As an example, sometimes I want gedit, sometimes write, sometimes kate, sometimes bluefish, sometimes vi. The difference in sometimes is what I'm doing because each has it's strength is different situations. Text editors, of course, are only the beginning. The only way M$ can really add features that users want is to let people have control of their computers - they need to GPL all of their code. Anything short of that will fail.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Right, so I can't run a choice of text editors on my Windows machine?
None of these will work?
Idiot.
You said you trusted MS's figures because it would be illegal for them to lie about them. Considering Microsoft's past history of ignoring the law when it suits them better, you can't base the validity of anything MS does on the legality of it.
In this particular case, their numbers are probably right because they would have essentially nothing to gain by releasing fake numbers, but would have legal repercussions for forging them. If forging the numbers would somehow cause significant harm to Linux, or cause them to win a large contract, they probably would forge them.
Show me an example of Windows XP refusing to install a program on the basis of market competition. Or demonstrate a case where the Open With command failed to accept the user's choice of executable because its VERSIONINFO block didn't include "Company = Microsoft Corporation".
Heck, I'd settle for you demonstrating that you know the Open With command EXISTS. Or can't you see that function of Windows through the cracks in the giant wall you've built between yourself and the outside world?
Yes, that only happens in the free software world. Yes, the "open with" menu I have here must be a figment of my imagination. You are so ignorant it's just painful.
Holy shit, you have more than one text editor in Linux?? Oh my god, that is like so cool!
Crap, I spilled pop all over my keyboard.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo