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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!
They announced this exactly a year ago!
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!!
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.
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.
No you may not. We (the community) are losing right now. Doing better and better, but still losing and losing pretty hard. We need to take what we can get. Baby steps, man, baby steps.
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?
According to TFS, these machines are targeted at the enteprise. And from the word on the street, YAST is a godsend for networked system management (since YAST handles way more than packages if you haven't noticed).
However, I would appreciate it if someome were to work on a similar product (or a port) to Ubuntu.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
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!
I find that very interesting. I have been running Suse for many years now, and one of the reasons is YAST. I like the fact that I can use it in text mode and do remote administration without running X. I have always found it to be a very user friendly application. I was also very pleased that when Novel bought Suse, one of the first things they did was open YAST. I would like to see it included with more distributions.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
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 have mod points right now and small part of me wanted to Mod you down. I really do try not to mod people down because their opinions differ from mine though so here I am posting.
Small steps in the wrong direction aren't good steps. They actually get you further from your goal.
While I am not certain that this is actually in the wrong direction - I do know that the Novell - Microsoft agreement is NOT THE RIGHT direction.
Losing does not justify making bad decisions.
Note as well that losing is your word. I did not realize that have a plethora of available software packages and alternatives meant losing. If you mean that the OS community is smaller then Microsoft then I'll agree. But when I want to run a LAMP server or toss Ubuntu on my new box I can do that.
I do have the freedom to choose. Agreements like the Novell - Microsoft agreement lead towards losing many of those freedoms.
Drivers are for kernels, so it might be for every kernel version but not for every distro. ...), but that stinks in Windows too, so here's to hoping they just give the kernel guys the API, and KDE/Gnome write their own controller in the settings panels.
The only thing that can influence the behavior between distro's is if they make a GUI to control the driver (GTK, X, QT,
YES, why should we support a company that is spending lots of time and money in making the things you use (Linux/FOSS)better. We should definitely not use ANYTHING from Novell..... /sarcasm.
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.
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.
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
Three cheers for Lenovo!
;-)
Well, maybe one cheer.
I did the obvious test, that I've done for a number of other such "Linux is available on FOO" announcements: I went to lenovo.com, and tried to configure a laptop that ran linux.
I failed.
Nowhere on any of the couple dozen pages that I looked at did the "linux" string appear. Nowhere was I even given a choice of operating system. The choice was "Windows Vista".
I'll give three cheers when someone who wants a linux machine can easily configure it and order it. Until then, I'll consider such announcements to be PR aimed at quieting the linux crowd without intending to sell anything to them.
It is sorta curious that a company would so blatantly violate the old "Give the customer what they want" rule. They don't have to force linux on Microsoft fans; all they have to do is make it available. That's not difficult. So why don't they do it?
(I recently checked at ibm.com, and I still couldn't figure out how to order a linux laptop from them, either.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Actually, Intel's fault in wifi is looking too far forward. They've got great drivers for their wifi chipsets, which will be in 2.6.23 when it comes out this fall. They're based on the 80211 stack which got into mainline in 2.6.22 (without any of the drivers that use it yet). There's been nothing stopping people from writing great Intel wifi drivers, except that there's been a great driver on the horizon from Intel, and nobody really wanted to tackle writing an obsolete one that could have been merged for a year before being replaced with a better-designed one. (Yes, I have been waiting for a year to be able to use nice all-open-source drivers on my Lenovo laptop with Intel wifi; how could you tell? At least the graphics drivers have actually arrived...)
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.
Ok, let's say I want to update some software.
In the KDE menu, do I go for Control Center, System > Control Center (YAST), or System > Configuration > Control Center (YAST)?
I'll pick one of the YAST ones.
Ok, now do I go for Software > Online Update, Software > System Update, or Software > Software Management?
I'll go for Software Management.
Ok, now I'm faced with the bizarrest interface I've seen in a long time.
It really shouldn't be this hard. Of course if I switch to Ubuntu/Red Hat/Debian etc I have to learn a completely different way of doing it.
For some things, choice is great. But seriously, for installing software, do we really need a billion systems?
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)
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.
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.
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