Dell to sell in Officeworks, but no Linux PCs, thank you (APC) [LWN.net]

APC reports that Dell will only be selling PCs loaded with Microsoft Vista through Officeworks in Australia. ""At this stage it's Vista only," Evan Williams, general manager for consumer sales and marketing at Dell South Asia, said during a telephone briefing on the plans. "We'll evaluate on the XP side." (For its recent revision of its Vestron small business line, Dell is allowing customers to downgrade their licence and purchase a machine with Windows XP already installed.) Nor is Dell planning to extend its Inspiron notebook line featuring Ubuntu rather than Windows, which has been successful in the US and Europe, into Australia." (Thanks to Dan Warne).

(Log in to post comments)

Officeworks already does Linux thanks

Posted May 1, 2008 22:33 UTC (Thu) by quozl (subscriber, #18798) [Link]

My local (150km away, Dubbo) Officeworks store sells Asus Eee PC with the default Xandros.
The demo units are set up in the default user friendly desktop mode, not the advanced "start
button" style mode.  It is the first user-interface level Linux they've seen in the store.
They've already had embedded devices for some time without realising it, I guess.  I can see
advantages to not setting up competition ... but I've no idea of their real motives.  The
staff at my local store have had nothing bad to say about them, except "small".  I was present
at one sale, was able to answer that Open Office can indeed open .doc files.  Didn't identify
myself though, and didn't say "you know, some of my code is in that thing, amazing".  The sale
went through, with the staff apologising that they only had pink and black units left, the
white ones had sold out.

Dell to sell in Officeworks, but no Linux PCs, thank you (APC)

Posted May 2, 2008 5:03 UTC (Fri) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Do they mean Vostro, not Vestron? Either way, rather awkward name as evidenced by publications
getting it wrong. Still, could have been worse -- took me quite a while to get used to
"Lenovo".