Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 3rd Jan 2008 23:05 UTC
Lenovo is undertaking an Olympic-size effort to establish itself as a consumer PC brand. The Chinese PC maker has found great success with the iconic ThinkPad brand of commercial laptops, a business it purchased from IBM. And now it's taking the world stage with a new line of consumer-focused notebooks called IdeaPad. There will also be a desktop line called IdeaCentre.
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Member since:2008-01-02
They're pre-installing Ubuntu. But they're not supporting it.
To my understanding it's not their problem but Canonical's. MS Windows is supported by Microsoft. And I don't know what kind of a deal Dell has with Canonical.
It is not true that this is not a big deal. Even as a marketing buzz is good to hear that someone ships a PC/Laptop with Linux. For my boss means something.
I just think the SLED would be a better option for Dell, but that's just my opinion.
Member since:2005-07-06
Yes SLED would be a far better choice for Dell to use. However, like you picked up on, Canonical provide support for Ubuntu. It was Canonical that first approached Dell and made the offer that they would be providing the end user support if Dell were to include Ubuntu.
I do not think Novell would have the manpower to do this.
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Member since:
2005-07-13
Dell is earning marketing buzz, but little else.
They're pre-installing Ubuntu. But they're not supporting it. They're not marketing it. They're not even making it easy to find on their website. Even the documentation included with the Ubuntu systems is the same Windows-oriented documentation they include with every system. The linux community is really gaining very little, because Dell is simply not investing anything. They're simply capitalizing on the community for incremental gain. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that, there's no such thing as bad publicity after all, but it's not a model I'd would hold for the other hardware vendors to follow.
Lenovo does distribute linux-based systems in China and other parts of Asia and Europe. They have relationships with Red Flag, Red Hat, Novell and I believe TurboLinux. So it's not undoable. But let's set our expectations higher. If manufacturers are going to acknowledge linux in western markets, let's see something more than a patronizing pat on the head. There's potential opportunity, but both the industry and the userbase themselves have to be willing to step up if it's going to work.