05.01.07
No Dell for Novell
Recently, Dell promised to preinstall Linux on desktops and laptops. Several speculations revolved around Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux while many people suggested that Novell’s SLED was “enterprise ready”. Despite all of this, Novell seems very unlikely to get love from Michael Dell. The following reveals a lot.
According to our sources, Ubuntu will be released on a Dell e-series “Essential” Dimension desktop, an XPS desktop, and an e-series Inspiron laptop.
The e-series systems are budget-priced PCs that start at $408 without a monitor. The base systems come with 512MB of RAM and a 160GB SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard drive. It appears that Dell will only be offering Ubuntu on one of the two systems in this family. The E521 is powered by an AMD Sempron 3400+ chip and uses a NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE Integrated Graphics GPU (graphics processor unit) for graphics. The alternative, the E520, uses an Intel 2.8GHz Celeron D processor.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
shane said,
May 1, 2007 at 8:53 am
Looks like all the models have Nvidia graphics, are these cards handled by the open source driver? Will Dellbuntu have "desktop bling" enabled by default?
Congrats to the Ubuntu folks/Canonical, this is the holy grail for distros and a tremendous opportunity for Free Software and Linux.
Roy Schestowitz said,
May 1, 2007 at 9:08 am
Details about the deals have not been disclosed and it will probably stay that way. Dell is already building up some pages to serve as valuable documentation not only to new buyers.
“How do I install Ubuntu 7.04 on my PC?”
Big URL from Dell
Also noteworthy:
Dell casts doubts on Vista
k said,
May 1, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Ubuntu is the 3rd one not the only one… as you can read it here.
“In addition to Ubuntu, Dell also offers pre-installed Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux on many of its server and desktop models.”
Roy Schestowitz said,
May 1, 2007 at 5:16 pm
True, k, but these are not new additions to the ‘family’. Or maybe I’m missing something…?
k said,
May 2, 2007 at 12:15 am
oh, it sounds like you mean dell will drop red hat/sled line from their offerings in the future…?
ubuntu is a well-hyped debian and big kudos for them, but dell’s dimension series is not part of the enterprise product line. they should offer something free against vista/xp in their product line so it’s not fair to compare to red hat or sled but you can compare to fedora or opensuse.
however it’s hard to buy dell with linux (at least in hungary). I bought few laptops to my company and they could offer only freedos vs windows. this is better than nothing but this is the real thing.
Roy Schestowitz said,
May 2, 2007 at 1:12 am
Let us wait and see the prices. There is no reason why GNU/Linux should be more expensive than Windows (or even sold for the same price). And yet, it would not suprise me if this turned out to be the case. In the past, FreeDOS machines (’Open Source’ is what they called these) were more expensive than XP-loaded machines despite the fact that there were no associated support burdens. None.