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Dell's Linux, IT Re-Invention
jcatcw writes "An IDG analysis of Dell's attempts to reinvent itself concludes that there are some positive results, but there are problems with the company's supply-chain management and support. One area analysts want to see more improvement: the company's Linux business. 'Jeremy Cole, owner of Proven Scaling, a small consulting firm with offices in the US and UK ... is satisfied with Dell equipment, but said the company needs to show more support for open-source applications and the Linux OS. "It's clear that Dell cares about Linux, in that all their server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and they have many people dedicated to making sure that's the case. However, it's not good enough just to boot," Cole said.'"
We have a company that was successful when the founder was running then foundered under his replacement. Now the founder returns and is righting the ship. Who would have thought that Dell would follow Apple's business model?
Or maybe you get what you pay for. I'm not going to comment on the quality of either of their offerings since I've only bought 2 computers in my life, and neither from these companies. However, if one company gives you a consistent quality product, an the other does not, then maybe the 25% markup is worth it. It really depends on how important the computers are to your business.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's just that the interim weenie was out for profit at all costs. Profit at all costs makes you a lot of money, initially, but one of the costs is your customer base.
It's going to take them a long time to win back the people who they alienated.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...and Linux, which TFA is about. I'd call that a "non-Vista option".
Also, if someone has an OS preference and is the IT department or has purchasing power in the IT department, one should be able to install the preferred OS. Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Suse, OpenSuse, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, eComStation, QNX, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and probably a hundred other non-Vista OS distributions will install on most Dell server and desktop systems.
If world-class OS support is necessary, it's probably best to sign a contract with an OS vendor or a third party specializing in supporting the OS. Depending on a hardware vendor to support the OS is kind of risky anyway.
I've had RedHat and Mandriva on lots of PowerEdge and Optiplex systems, and I've never gotten Dell's permission or asked them for support. The only companies that make hardware that should be your final stop for supporting software are companies like IBM, Sun, SGI, or Apple that make the hardware and software both.
those with the initiative to pick up after the puppy, to follow your analogy, probably were willing to work to pay for the puppy. [stretching here] that is to say they probably built a custom server. I know that is a big task for a fortune 500 type enterprise server, but most of dells server market is smaller servers than that from what I have seen. if they really wanted to just duck the "ms tax" they would have been asking for clean HDs out of the box. less work for dell and gives them a clean slate to install their own linux. it seems pretty clear the "please preinstall linux" crowd was planning to snowball it to "please support linux" when you look at it that way.
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
OpenManager (the all-seeing, all-encompassing web-based management tool) does not work on 64 bit OS's because it is compiled for 32 bit, and needs 32 bit libraries. The RPM dependencies are not properly set, which they claim they're "working on", but they can't even be bothered to provide a list of the packages we need to install
Openmanager works fine on CentOS 4.x (x86_64) and Fedora7 (x86_64). We use it where I work with no problems at all.
(You are perhaps not aware that 64-bit Linux has no trouble running 32-bit apps, as long as you install 32-bit libraries in parallel with 64-bit ones?)
Redhat AS / Centos 5.1 are not supported. Various drivers either don't load, or segfault after spewing error messages on the console.
I have not had this problem on any of the Optiplex or Poweredge boxes I've run CentOS 5.x on
Your other criticisms I agree with for the most part. I could not have said it better with regard to Java, and am not a fan of the PERC controllers either.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
theres a larger problem that you are missing; a. they should offer a NO os system and let you put on it what you will.
b. the largest problems they encounter from the linux world is the fact that they put system features that not just don't work under linux but break it.
If you offer linux on a product it should work on the product; that means the wireless cards should be supported by the Linux OS that Dell offers; and that dell should steer towards using components that are linux friendly..
its no different probably from a lot of the heat they will get in regards to vista/xp up and downgrades. You try to change and you can't find the drivers you need for the version because they only gave a CD for one version; and they don't provide a quality list of the named components in YOUR machine and which driver you should be getting.. i remember doing a search with my express tag back in the day and was offered a large amount of different video drivers for many different cards that even seemingly had the same name. sigh.
the problem seems to be more a tip toeing issue; if you say one word to them that indicates anything (software inclusive) is non-stock (which aside from music, data files, and emails is pretty much everything) they will likely try to say "we dont support that app" and they try to persuade you to think that it has anything to do with anything or that it alleviates them from supporting the stuff THEY put there. case in point: they advertise lots of room for expansion in the pci bays... except they wont support anything there; if are slapping in something simple like a regular sound card, or network card you are usually ok... but when you have a network card, a wireless card, and a sound card there... and you need to add a new card that cant share an IRQ you might run into problems becuase the merry go round game doesnt work; the slots (at least back in 2000-2002) werent hard coded to an irq and reserving didnt quite work; and random things get bounced around and leave some unused or will share an irq with your new device instead of with someother device you could care less about... this is problematic when you try to add something to say take advantage of the hard drive bays, or specialized sound card for digital audio or video capturing / activities... its funny because on an older machine with an older bios you actually could do some of these things... like turn off the LPT and com ports you waste irqs on becuase your printer mouse and keyboard are usb... sad that there are still only 16 irqs still, several never available to user at all. And this was all under WindowsME in the pre XP days; (me did better on this and the audio drivers needed than 98sr2... tho XP fixed a whole lot of it and it all worked properly and better than it ever had; the only irony being that in order to install the software and drivers for the hardware you had to copy the setup cd to a local folder so that you could have the machine lie to the executable and say that it wasnt XP because they decided to hardcode not letting it work normally on XP whcih didnt exist when it was made..
The other key problem with parent is that there are two different crowds of people saying this. The guy who says he will reinstall from scratch probably isn't the one calling with the stupid support issue; they are the ones who discover things like the directMedia/destroyer problem.
If they added some notes to the configurator like "this card or option is problematic or lacks open source drivers under linux" etc they might be minimally better off.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
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