Star It's Official: Dell To Offer Pre-Installed Ubuntu
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st May 2007 13:08 UTC, submitted by Jack
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu After yesterday's unconfirmed rumour about Ubuntu being pre-installed on Dell machines, it has now become official. In a joint statement released today, Dell and Canonical announced that Dell will now offer laptops and desktop computers pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux 7.04. The computers will be sold via Dell's web site, said Canonical's director of operations Jane Silber. "We have worked with Dell to get Ubuntu fully supported and fully certified on Dell hardware," she said. "Ubuntu has the full endorsement of Dell." Update: Ubuntu Linux 7.04 Feisty Fawn review by Extremetech.
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RE[2]: What a terrible review...
by kaiwai on Wed 2nd May 2007 12:14 UTC in reply to "RE: What a terrible review..."
kaiwai
Member since:
2005-07-06

Yep, a really bad review. Driver (auto)configuration problem, only real problem in that review, is still a legacy of Xorg/XFree and is finally about to be addressed. And unlike Mac, which runs on strictly defined set of hardware, Linux basically produces many graphic drivers without any help from hardware companies.


But the issue was with the shipped standard, non-3d accelerated driver; when you install it, it is very conservative about what it allows as to ensure that the maximum amount of hardware is supported out of the box - thats no different to Windows XP or Windows Vista defaulting to 800x600 on first boot.

If he wanted higher resolution - install the Nvidia driver from Nvidia, follow the instruction - problem solved.

For other problems maybe he should now that: Ubuntu doesn't default to install Flash player by policy (neither do Firefox or IE on Windows). And btw. not all people prefer to have that installed automatically. DVD playback is not there because of possible law issues, but it can be installed very simply. Ditto for codecs.

So that guy probably got some bucks to make a negative review, but it ended up extremely poor.


But the stupid thing, it isn't as though you have to set up special repositories - load up the add/remove and follow the instructions - that's a damn site easier than having to trawl through he net downloading the various CODECS and players one needs for Windows.

For me, I downloaded all that I needed, and I was away ripping music using FAAC and synchronising with my ipod within seconds. Thats a damn site easier than with Windows - everything supported out of the box, bar the webcam which was a tar vzxf followed by a sudo make install, followed by a reboot, and my webcam is all working.

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