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Ubuntu On Dell After Four Months
mrcgran sends us to LXer for an interview with John Hull, a manager of the Linux Engineering team at Dell, where he reports on how the Ubuntu machines have been working out for them so far. "Embracing Ubuntu Linux on our desktops and laptops seems to have really raised Dell's visibility within the Linux community. We have been supporting, testing, developing for, and selling Linux for 8+ years here at Dell, but before the Ubuntu announcement, a lot of people didn't know that we did any of that... Previous to our Ubuntu product announcement... we would have a conversations with vendors about pushing Linux support for their hardware, but without a Linux product offering from Dell for that hardware, it was very difficult to convince them to release Linux drivers. That has certainly changed now... The original sales estimates for Ubuntu computers was around 1% of the total sales, or about 20,000 systems annually. The program so far is meeting expectations. Customers are certainly showing their interest and buying systems preloaded with Ubuntu, but it certainly won't overtake Microsoft Windows anytime soon."
Our lab has been buying Dell servers for a few years now, because they certify the machines as being Linux compatible. Instead of checking the hardware specs against the list of available Linux drivers, I can buy knowing that things will just work. Kudos.
Dell doesn't offer any sytems with Ubuntu preinstalled in the Netherlands. I was looking for a new laptop for my parents, and I managed to convince them to go Linux. So I went to the Dell website, but alas, no such luck. Still, knowing that their hardware will work with Ubuntu was enough for me to go Dell anyway.
It's under Desktop->Open-Source PCs or Laptop->Open-Source PCs on the Higher Ed. portal I'm looking at.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
If you're on Ubuntu there are places such as http://www.getdeb.net/ where you can get popular programs that aren't in the repositories yet.
Dell for sometime has provided pretty decide web support for Debian. The web pages I've come across have always been enough to get me started when needing to setup a new server. :-)
The other way around (adding Vista to a Linux Box) is slightly more complicated:
http://my.opera.com/djfake/blog/dell-preloaded-with-ubuntu
Or you could buy an Intel Mac and use boot camp, that's ea$y enough too! c
www.itjerk.com
If you go to Ubuntu.com there's a link on the right side of the page to buy preinstalled Ubuntu systems from Dell, which sends you to Dell's site.
I know several other people have given various links, but I prefer Ubuntu's own link because it links to Dell's sites for the UK, France, and Germany as well as the US, making it more generally useful. It also provides an overview of the support options you can get from Canonical through Dell.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Not really. It's more to do with the fact that once a version of Ubuntu is released you only get security updates in the repository. So for example there is no Pidgin in Ubuntu Feisty because that was released after Ubuntu Feisty was.
The reason they only provide security updates is because they don't want a situation where continuously updating stuff in the repositories breaks other programs. Instead Canonical will take a snapshot of all the new programs and work really hard testing that snapshot and sorting out all the bugs, release that out the door and start working on the next version.
So if you want Pidgin or another must have updated program on Feisty then you go to getdeb.net
Ubuntu Gutsy is being released on 18th this month (2 days) so that'll have a ton of updated programs, features, etc.
Yes, simple;
RPM. Most users can download an RPM, double click on it, and it'll get installed properly.
I'm 99% sure that Ubuntu or Debian people can do similar things with DEBs. Of course, the downside with the package approach is you have to have one package per distro (take a look at Skype; skype isn't in any linux repositories, but it supplies 4-5 RPMs and a binary tarball).
If you prefer something that is more like a Windows installer, use autopackage. Autopackages are distro neutral. Here's the quote from their website:
# What is autopackage?
For users: it makes software installation on Linux easier. If a project provides an autopackage, you know it can work on your distribution. You know it'll integrate nicely with your desktop and you know it'll be up to date, because it's provided by the software developers themselves. You don't have to choose which distro you run based on how many packages are available.
For developers: it's software that lets you create binary packages for Linux that will install on any distribution, can automatically resolve dependencies and can be installed using multiple front ends, for instance from the command line or from a graphical interface. It lets you get your software to your users quicker, easier and more reliably. It immediately increases your user base by allowing people with no native package to run your software within seconds.
As you can see from the screenshots, autopackage is pretty dead-easy for end users.
There are also next-generation packaging utilities that are overtaking Windows MSI-type things, including openSuSE's one-click-install, and KDE's klik://, but neither of these has taken hold with enough Linux distros yet (you have to be using SuSE 10.3, or install a package on older SuSEs, and klik:// requires a kio-slave).
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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Did you submit a bug on launchpad about that laptop giving the details of what your network card problem was? If not it won't get fixed. Ubuntu is mostly run by volunteers that depends on people like you to submit bug reports.
Also did you check the irc chatroom or forums out for help? I had one guy in the IRC room that couldn't get his webcam working on Ubuntu. After I did a quick search on the forums I found a post on how to get his hardware working and gave him the link. He thanked me and said it was now working.
I don't think that this is really the fault of Ubuntu. It's the fault of the software makers themselves. (if fault is to be assigned) Any software maker has the option of making a .deb or .rpm, it's just that many, for various reasons, choose not to. The reason these pieces of software install so easily on Windows is that somebody made the installer. Software doesn't just install itself on windows from source code. It all comes back to the necessity of making these installers. If you want your software to run on Windows, and it has registry keys, etc, you absolutely have to build an installer. Not so in Linux. You can compile from source code, and while it's a pain in the ass, it is certainly doable.
One of the possible reasons is that you have 95% of the market covered by Windows. As a commercial software maker, assuming that your software is Linux compatible in the first place, are you going to bother making a Ubuntu package? Another possibility is that you are a lone programmer making a small app, and don't have time to research package making.
All of my experiences with 3rd party commercial software on Linux has been pretty good. Currently, I have Unreal Tournament 2004 on my machine, and it's installed perfectly on Ubuntu Dapper and Feisty - both 32 and 64 bit versions, Fedora Core, and Gentoo without a hitch - ever. Ditto for Bibble Pro. Quake and Return to Castle Wolfenstein have worked perfectly too, other than the fact that I had to copy a few files from the windows CD.
Please don't forget http://www.getdeb.net/
There is a lot of stuff I download from there, games, DVD burning software, up to date scribus, come to mind.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Please, tell me one thing that putty can do that ssh, telnet, and xterm can't. The point is moot, anyway, because putty, putty-tools (plink, pscp, psftp, puttygen) and pterm (putty terminal emulator) are in the Ubuntu repository, ie, if you like them better, you can still use them.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
There are distributions specifically for low end hardware. Puppy Linux is one that I've had success with. There are others. It is probably better in the long run for distros like Ubuntu to concentrate their efforts on current middle of the road hardware. Low end old hardware imposes a lot of tradeoffs that current general purpose distro's won't manage well. Distros made with such hardware specifically in mind tend to fare better. Puppy, for instance, could completely install itself in memory on the machine you mention at boot. Since the use case is browse Gmail with a browser, if the nic was lit up then you'd have been home with little or nothing to install.
Skype offers an APT repository for Debian and Ubuntu users:
http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/repositories.html
And so do many other companies. For example, Google also provides an APT repository:
http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/apt.html
Thanks to Synaptic, adding a new repository to Ubuntu is pretty easy, even for your average user.
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