Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
Driver support for Free Software operating systems on laptops is traditionally somewhat hit and miss. If a large manufacturer is providing Linux pre-installed, then this means that they are going to be building laptops out of components that have Linux drivers. This makes shopping for a laptop much easier for anyone planning on running Linux (or *BSD, for that matter).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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, really.
Apple tried that (might still be trying it, for all I know), and it didn't make any difference. When I was in K-8 (eighties), you would have been hard-pressed to find a non-Apple product in any of the classrooms. When I was in HS (90-94), the school computer lab had only Macs. Our two semesters of programming were taught in Pascal on Macs. It wasn't until college that I had a PC computer lab available to me. Didn't make any difference at all.
Why not? Because I didn't make the purchasing decisions for my family. My parents did. And my dad had to use PCs at work. This had nothing to do with what he had grown up using - PCs were thin on the ground when he graduated HS in '67 - but with what his office had purchased. Which means, despite Apple's best efforts at co-opting the brains of America's youth, I learned to use the PC.
Which is why, once the PC was entrenched on the office desktop, that was it. If we want Linux/BSD/HURD/what-have-you to gain widespread adoption, it's the business desktop that we need to target.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
The best part about this is you've got two separate companies (Lenovo and Dell), two different product lines (Thinkpads and Inspirons), and two different distributions of Linux (SUSE and Ubuntu). This means that both companies and both distros will be pushing to get laptop hardware support working well with Linux.
If you've just got Dell trying to buy compatible hardware for a single product line, then good Linux support for each laptop component might only come from a single manufacturer. Now that Lenovo's in the game, they'll be looking for Linux compatibility from their hardware manufacturers' as well; manufacturers which are bound to be different in many cases from Dell's. Let's also not forget software configuration, how many times have you been using one distro and just can't get some piece of hardware to work, you find a solution online, but come to find out it's only if you're using a certain distro with a certain kernel version.
This situation means better hardware support for everyone no matter the distro or company (or lack there of).
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
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.