Lenovo Removes Linux Option For Home Buyers

billybob2 writes "Lenovo has stopped selling laptops pre-installed with Linux on its web site, only 8 months after starting the trial program. This means that home customers won't be able to buy a Thinkpad without paying the Microsoft tax. Word has it that the decision to pull the plug on Linux came down from the highest levels of the Chinese company's corporate headquarters. For those looking to buy full-sized laptops and desktops with Linux pre-loaded Dell, System76, ZaReason and Everex all still offer such products."

Comments

Maybe Vista is better?

[tjstork]

I'm having a really bad Linux day, because I installed KDE 4.1 on my Hardy Heron Ubuntu box, and found that, after the dust settled, I was booting with an extra kernel, my graphics were destroyed and my networking was f--- up. About the only thing that works right, actually, is in fact Vista running in a VirtualBox OSE environment, and I'm so bitter about KDE trashing my machine that I'm about ready to say screw Linux and just format the whole dang thing to Vista, if only I can find the signed drivers..

I bought a T61 w/Linux: It now has WinXP on it

[cavehobbit]

A couple of months ago I decided to try a Lenovo with Linux. I was shopping for a new laptop to replace an Hp ZD8000, which had dual boot Ubuntu/XP.

The Lenovo was very well done. SuSe worked perfectly as did everything installed. Even wireless! Heaven Forfend!

But the installation was very lean, having only the minimal software needed to run what was pre-installed, like open office, etc.

Video? Nope. Not a chance. and other things.

trying to figure out the required packages and configuration settings was way too much work. after a few days, including reinstalling it using the included disk, I bough a copy of XP from NewEgg and installed it over the SuSe.

I was able to get the various windows drivers directly from Lenovo, though I did have to get the first few using a different PC, as the LAN and wireless cards were not supported right on the XP disk. If I had a land line I could have used the modem, but I don't.

But with about an hour of searching and downloading I had everything working. Firefox, embedded and streaming video, MS Office as well as open office, wireless set up, Avast installed and downloading Windows updates to bring everything up to date. Which, by the way, broke nothing.

If I was going to order a bunch of machines for a corporate distribution, with Linux pre-installed, using a standardized, uniform set of add on software, with the machines so tightly locked down that users could not change ANYTHING, I would order a truckload of these Linux-T61's.

But for any other purpose, heck no.

I gave up on Linux after a couple years trying to use it, both dual boot on the HP, and solo on desktops. I even went about 6 months without booting Windows at home.

But Linux is not ready for use by anyone but serious hobbyists. For anyone that just wants something the works, choose Windows.

In Windows, everything works good enough on a clean install that you can boot up. Updates to the system software rarely if ever break something. drivers are available for everything. video, mice with more than 3 buttons, wireless, bluetooth, PIM manager software and syncing with a PDA all work.

You can NOT say that about Linux.
  When you can, I'll take another look.

Call me in 5 years.

Lenovo the Chinese state's flagship

[Anonymous Bullard]

I don't have a problem with MS making money. I'd much rather have the money go to MS and then get filtered back into the US economy and partially eventually back into my pocket than burned or sent to China where the money doesn't come back this way.

Surely you are aware that Lenovo (formerly Legend) is significantly owned by the Chinese Communist Party's state organs and their cronies, and that most (probably all) Lenovos are made in China.

Somehow I doubt that buying MS-preloaded Lenovos will help counter the masterfully engineered massive trade imbalance between the "People's Republic of China" and the rest of the world.

In this case buying a non-MS-preloaded device (but perhaps with a localized and locally supported version of Linux) that is built in a free country by a company not directly supporting China's military expansionism and trade/currency manipulation might be an option?

Re:Lenovo the Chinese state's flagship

[Anonymous Bullard]

By "free country" you certainly wouldn't mean an "independent" Tibet, which would be a poverty-stricken theocracy where slavery would be , and which would be a Western protectorate. Some "free country" you're advocating, you worthless trash.

Dear Chinese supremacist fenqing,

In this context by "free country" I actually referred to any non-expansionist and non-genocidal country with a democratic government; i.e a decent country which doesn't represent a threat to its neighbours or its own people.

But now that you brought up your dictatorship's military-imperialist claims (and brutal rule) over China's neighbouring countries it would be a good time to set some facts straight:

• 1) Tibetans are non-Chinese in every respect: Through millenia of unique and unified Tibetan culture, by language and its written phonetic script which have nothing to do with Chinese, by their religion and beliefs which is a fusion of Tibetan Buddhism and the ancient Bon which originated in Central Asia, by their ethnicity (which the Chinese are taught to be inferior) and of course by their millenia of independent history (with the occasional war with neighbouring states, including the Chinese). Until the 1949 communist Chinese invasion, Tibet had its own central government, army, currency, flag, postal system, education system, diplomatic relations with its neighbours...

• 2) China's despot rulers' nominal claims over the Tibetan people stem from medieval ignorance by China's god-king emperors who were deluded enough to really believe that the whole world were subject to their divine rule. Such claims by any feudal overlords are considered lunatic nonsense in the modern era, except apparently in China, and they are the very definition of *imperialism*.

• 3) Tibetans have no desire to be ruled (and being wiped out as a nation) by any foreign military occupation, Tibetans were never asked if they want Mao's (the most murderous individual in human history) communist army to come in and subjugate them and since the 1949 invasion any chance to speak up for Tibetan rights has been brutally supressed.

• 4) The large Tibetan community in exile is run democratically through free and secular elections and even if the vast majority of Tibetans are devoted Buddhists there are no calls by any one to re-establish Vatican-style government in Tibet. Only CCP's propaganda aimed at domestic Chinese masses is repeating such lies ad nauseaum, and unfortunately some seem to believe that propaganda.

• 5) Unlike the Chinese, Tibetans have no overriding urge to become rich, militaristic and able to dominate other peoples (or even the world). Yet Tibet would be relatively wealthy if their extensive natural resources weren't being ripped off indiscriminately by the occupying Chinese military-industrial complex.

• 6) Try to look beyond your xenophobia for a moment and think about your claim of Tibetans wanting to become a "protectorate" of anyone. Of course, the Chinese CCP regime deems mere Tibetan calls for democracy and self-determination (both universal United Nations objectives) as immediate threats to its dictatorship.

Finally, angry Chinese nationalist fenqing like yourself invariably hate the pre-democratic Western imperialist and especially the Japanese empires for having dared to temporarily violate the integrity of the Chinese homeland (among many other lands) even partially. Yet you are now blindly supporting such military-imperialist aggression (and in a far more total and genocidal form) against China's peaceful neighbours? It is a sad time when a potentially positive civilization chooses to throw both morality and objectivity out of the window in their mad scramble to global domination.

Sad, sad fenqing

[Anonymous Bullard]

You are a sad, sad case, but a fine showcase of fenqing inability to engage in anything remotely resembling a debate.

I gave you several detailed arguments and all you can do is resort to shouting "LIES LIES!!", "WEST IS EVIL" and "ALL THEIR LAND IS BELONG TO US!!" style nonsense without a single logical, let alone moral, point.

Without your ilk the absolute madness and destruction of the "cultural revolution" couldn't have been possible.