Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)
According to John Hull, Linux OS engineering manager for Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, these images are intended to "help with installing the OS on the Inspiron 1420 and 530. This media includes the drivers and fixes necessary to get the OS up and running with supported hardware on those systems." In addition, the ISO images will work with the Dell Inspiron E1505n."
Posted Sep 14, 2007 18:54 UTC (Fri)
by proski (subscriber, #104)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Sep 15, 2007 18:53 UTC (Sat)
by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256)
[Link] (5 responses)
However, as I also said, Ubuntu *could*.
Yes, Ubuntu is (yet another form of) Linux. In fact it is specifically (yet another form of) Debian. If Ubuntu becomes the defacto standard "Linux desktop" then it would be splitting hairs to make this argument.
It's fine for us, steeped in the technology, to argue that there shouldn't need to be a "standard, unified, single" (shades of monopolistically mandated) "Linux desktop." But the fact is that we can argue about LSB this and give countless examples of how it "shouldn't matter" and how competent and dedicated programmers *should* write portable code and how all manner of packaging infrastructure should allow us to support COTS (commercial, of-the-shelf) software across a range of distributions, et cetera, ad nauseum.
However, the simple fact is that there are tens of thousands of stupid, proprietary, niche software products which are not maintained by top notch, dedicated programming professionals. The relatively minor differences between RHEL and SLES and Ubuntu and even between RHEL4 and RHEL5 make the prospect of supporting "Linux" (in general) a nightmare for those people (and to lesser and varying degree a nightmare for most of their users).
I'm thinking of things like the ubquitous door/badge keylock systems that most of us use to get into our offices every working day ... and the systems wired up to the multitude of security cameras on loading docks etc. ... and the software that ships with those little OCR "pens" or those tablets that can electronically capture and transcribe a digital image of your paper scribblings ... and those digital whiteboards ... and for the software to save and restore settings to my ham radio gear ... and ... thousands of products I haven't even seen nor thought of.
My hope is that Ubuntu *will* become that standard ... and that Red Hat and Novell (and others, including Debian itself) will eventually be forced (by market demands) to truly converge on that standard in some way. (By this I mean purely for provide the desktop/productivity services --- not for servers, development or other purposes). I don't care if that is realized as Xen DomU images, chroot jails or other hackery. I do care that it be a truly consolidated target standard ... something functional and ad hoc, and that it NOT more paperware LSB standards!
Why Ubuntu? Mostly because they are the one distribution that has shown the deepest commitment to human factors without any hint of commercial lock-in. (Yeah, Canonical is back there somewhere --- but they've made a pretty clear commitment to keep Ubuntu *free* in ways that Red Hat and Novell haven't. There's no "subscription model" and no bifurcation of "enterprise" and "community" editions there, nor on their horizon. (Yeah, I know ... some will quibble about "free" as it relates to Stallman's crusade against non-free drivers ... but that's not the Freedom I'm talking about. Meanwhile, the differences between Fedora and RHEL are bad enough to be PART of the problem that I'm describing here).
Anyway, I'm obviously ranting. (Hazard of contributing to LWN threads during my first cup of coffee).
My point is, I'm glad that Dell is taking these baby steps with Ubuntu ... and I hope that this is the prelude to an avalanche of mainstream commercial support for it.
JimD
Posted Sep 16, 2007 4:24 UTC (Sun)
by proski (subscriber, #104)
[Link] (2 responses)
LSB-style standard environments don't evolve in the same way as distributions do. Enforcing binary compatibility for applications while allowing the libraries to evolve would turn the system into a mess of wrappers and incompatible interfaces.
Perhaps you don't know much of LSB if you call it "paperware". It actually includes some software, such as software development kits and test kits.
And by the way, I don't think unmaintainable software is a good excuse. If you need some software for a serious task, and it's unmaintained, maybe you should maintain at least an unofficial branch.
Posted Sep 16, 2007 8:37 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
If you'll take a look on wide (i.e.: non-IT) world you'll find that almost all packages out there are "unmaintained". How come ? Easy: most companies out there are small and don't have anyone who can write/change/support the software. They contact some other firm who can do all this and get the software written. What about support ? It's included (usually) but must be paid on case-by-case basis. So in the end the software is used as-is for years and 5-10-15 years later (when it's really hard to find compatible hardware and software) it's rewritten from scratch (often by some other firm). It's problem with Windows (where Service Pack can break things and thus will cost money), but with Linux - it's disaster. We can argue that "you should maintain at least an unofficial branch" as much as we can but the fact is: noone will bother. And if Linux can not be used in such environment then only IT firms and huge corporations (who do have the resources to maintain the software) will ever use it.
Posted Sep 17, 2007 12:50 UTC (Mon)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
This is exactly how IBM mainframes still exist. They've been doing this crap for going on 20-30 years now. Mainframe applications are typically very closed source. They are made using a mixture of non-portable languages.. a lot of very tightly optimized assembly languages. People have been working on and have modifications made to legacy applications going on several decades.
At work we have cpu boxes from the late ninties, upgraded with 2000-era technology, running software from the eighties with hardware spanning the entire range of years... everything from 1980's terminals and tape drives to modern Linux Suse boxes connecting to the mainframe directly via fiber optics.
Hell, a couple years ago we just got rid of the last of vertical reel mount tape drives and they had internal parts stamped with dates out of the late 1970's.
How does all of this work? Virtualization. It's a standard part of any large IBM thing. It's one of their huge selling point and without it the whole mainframe market would fall to peices.
Sure, sure, backward compatability is nessicary. It's VERY good to have.
But it's a double-edged sword. It's a boat anchor on the ship of progress.
So Linux needs a balanced approach.. It needs to keep good backward compatability, within reason... ie fix bugs that break backward compatability... keep duplicate functionality if it doesn't cost much. etc etc. It needs to make programming very easy so that people who do need new apps can quickly and cheaply get them, open source helps this quite a bit. It also needs to take advantage of virtualization and emulation that has good usability to provide for very long-term backward compatability.
Posted Sep 17, 2007 3:03 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link]
Yeah, that is the problem with proprietary software. Any idiot can (and does) start their own little application, without being able to reuse the knowledge, experience and code of other people in an efficient manner. Yes, you can buy "binary blob" libs, which you cannot fix or change, so you either wait for supplier to fix that (slow) or work around yourself, which is again inefficient.
Open source to the rescue. If the solution is substandard, it can be (and it is) replaced or rewritten by others much easier because the knowledge and experience of it is clearly laid out in source code. This of course takes time and effort, but it has been achieved in many, many different areas by now. It will come in other areas as the current, completely uneconomical (from the users' perspective) proprietary software model faces more competition from open source. The more they feel the squeeze, the less of the "stupid and proprietary" pieces of software desktop Linux will have to cater for.
We just need to be patient. We already lost the "first mover" advantage, which went to Microsoft, so that cannot be fixed anyway.
Posted Sep 17, 2007 11:05 UTC (Mon)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link]
However, many people in the FOSS world do not accept that, and since they are the people making things happen, they are effectively the ones who decide. See http://trac.autopackage.org/wiki/LinuxProblems for a (not completely diplomatic) discussion of the subject.
Posted Sep 14, 2007 22:33 UTC (Fri)
by a_hippie (guest, #34)
[Link] (7 responses)
Thank you Dell. If I were shopping for a laptop, you'd be on the top of a very short list.
regards,
Posted Sep 15, 2007 1:53 UTC (Sat)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
[Link]
Thanks, Dell. I run Linux myself on a Dell laptop, but since I've been doing this for years I had to do it on my own.
Posted Sep 15, 2007 7:54 UTC (Sat)
by bluegecko (guest, #42312)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 15, 2007 8:00 UTC (Sat)
by mbottrell (guest, #43008)
[Link] (1 responses)
Might have been wise to use the 7.04 internally and use 7.10 as the official release... particularly as it's likely to have LTS.
Posted Sep 15, 2007 8:28 UTC (Sat)
by Los__D (guest, #15263)
[Link]
Posted Sep 15, 2007 8:16 UTC (Sat)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (2 responses)
It's pretty nice. Pretty much everything worked out of the box.. the only thing that wasn't completely well done was the 3D drivers. I got 3D acceleration, but not enough to support Compiz. Upgrading to drivers from Gutsy solved that.
The fit and finish of the product was very good, for Linux.
Posted Sep 15, 2007 18:30 UTC (Sat)
by tjc (guest, #137)
[Link] (1 responses)
Did you get a T5250, or upgrade to something faster? I ordered a T7100, but I don't know if it was worth the extra money. How is the display?
Posted Sep 17, 2007 13:21 UTC (Mon)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
The only trouble with the display is that it's glossy so that reflects stuff easily.. the trade off is that the colors and color depth are a bit better then it would be otherwise, I think.
The only real trouble hardware-wise is that after hibernation the sound doesn't always work. Maybe 50/50 chance. I need to rmmod and modprobe the snd-hda-intel module. Also the sound needs the model=3stack option pased to it to work.
With upgraded 3D drivers (from gutsy) Compiz works fantasticly. The downside is that with OpenGL applications and 'xv' video acceleration you get a lot of those ugly artififacts. The EXA drivers for the intel stuff will fix it and make xv/opengl work alongside OpenGL composition, but EXA is slower then using non-acceleration in the first place!
I think I heard somebody say that the Intel driver devs said they were waiting till composition matured a bit more before they start worrying about that to much.
I don't know, but it seems to me that the time is now. The Compiz-Fusion project was a HUGE step forward if my experiances are worth anything. Before Fusion Compiz was 'ok', and Beryl was unstable... but now it's all smooth sailing even with using CVS snapshots.
Sure sure wobbly windows and such are useless and annonying, but there is just so much more going on here. Most of the stuff should be turned off, but with a few intellegent choices on what features to enable you can get a good boost in window-manager-related functionality over using Metacity. It adds a whole 'nother dimension to window management (har har).
Posted Sep 15, 2007 9:22 UTC (Sat)
by ottavioc (guest, #47418)
[Link] (6 responses)
This is not a great day for FOSS!
http://www.pledgebank.com/boycottvista
Posted Sep 15, 2007 9:25 UTC (Sat)
by pjdc (guest, #6906)
[Link]
Posted Sep 15, 2007 20:20 UTC (Sat)
by jordanb (guest, #45668)
[Link] (3 responses)
A bigger problem is that they're still only selling Ubuntu to 'home users' and not businesses. There are a lot of businesses who are already comfortable with Linux because it's already all over their server room who might consider Linux on the desktop if they could get it from an OEM.
Posted Sep 16, 2007 0:32 UTC (Sun)
by salimma (subscriber, #34460)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 16, 2007 3:31 UTC (Sun)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
[Link]
Now, I run Fedora 7 on a Dell laptop myself; it can be done and works pretty well. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that Dell chose Ubuntu, because it all has to do with a company being ready, willing, and able to back them up.
Posted Sep 16, 2007 3:38 UTC (Sun)
by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
[Link]
It depends on the size of the business. For big business, Dell has supported Red Hat Linux as an enterprise-supplied factory-loaded disk image for over five years.
Posted Sep 17, 2007 20:00 UTC (Mon)
by amikins (guest, #451)
[Link]
Yes, Linux is better, and Dell is seeing that there's a market for it. The effort they've putting into this honestly astounds me, considering their business history. They clearly really mean this, they just can't afford to let go and recommend any form of Linux for home users as of yet.
As an additional note, I'd like to say that throwing dollar signs into arbitrary words adds little to a discussion; if you aren't able to speak about a product using its proper name, that makes it difficult to view your statements as anything objective.
Nice contrast to "13 reasons why Linux won't make it to a desktop near you". Instead of looking for reasons, Dell looks for ways to help its customers.
Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)
As I said in my earlier response to that posting ... Brebach's reasoning is not entirely unfounded. There are reasons why "Linux" (in all it's diversity) won't make significant inroads into the desktop marketplace.13 reasons ...
I don't think Ubuntu cares too much about backward or forward compatibility as a development platform. Software compiled on 7.04 is not guaranteed to run on 6.10 or 7.10.
13 reasons ...
Only 10% (or so) of software packages are maintained
All the better for virtualization.Only 10% (or so) of software packages are maintained
> However, the simple fact is that there are tens of thousands of stupid, proprietary, niche software products which are not maintained by top notch, dedicated programming professionals.13 reasons ...
I don't think that the main problem is one of a single standard distribution. I think that the problem is one of mindset. Most of the people producing Linux-based systems generally don't see the need for binary compatibility of that sort, and as a result it is patchy at best. If there was a wide enough belief that something like LSB binary compatibility was essential, it would work perfectly in almost every distribution, and it would be treated as a distribution bug if a package which made reasonable attempts to be LSB-compatible did not work correctly.13 reasons ...
I am just amazed to see this in print. I think this might be one of the first brightest hours for the FoSS community.Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)
A major vendor is making a significant investment in making a Linux distro work well on laptops. That's unprecedented. Others have helped before, but to actually put out a fixed and remastered distribution.
Yes, this is huge
I've been looking for a new laptop.. thanks Dell, the overt support of Linux Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)
has tipped the decision your way.
Hmm.. and a month before Ubuntu 7.10 comes out.Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)
It will NOT be Gutsy that is the LTS release, but the one after.Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)
I've got a Dell 1420n. Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)
I've got one on the way. Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)
I got Intel GMA x3000 graphics with the 1440x900 display. It's very very nice. Much much much better then my old Ibook. Totally blows it away.Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)
I still wouldn't buy from Dell because they still recommend Window$.But Dell still recommends Window$
It's likely that their OEM contract with Microsoft requires them to recommend Windows.But Dell still recommends Windows
I'm not surprised by that. They don't want to get a big increase in support calls from people who have no idea what Ubuntu is being upset that the computer they got didn't have Windows on it.But Dell still recommends Window$
Dell offers SLES and RHEL on servers / workstations. Rather schizophrenic, if you ask me -- I'd like to see Fedora or Red Hat Desktop offered for home desktops, and conversely, don't see why they could not offer Ubuntu LTS for business offerings. But Dell still recommends Window$
It's a matter of support. Red Hat and Novell are eager to support their server distros, and Red Hat in particular is not interested in providing commercial support for the desktop, and certainly not for laptops. Canonical is proving support to Dell's customers for Ubuntu on the desktop and laptop.
Not at all schizophrenic
But Dell still recommends Window$
And why shouldn't they recommend Windows? For their purposes, Windows is a mature, known element. They know that their hardware works with it, they know what kind of problems pop up, and it's generally predictable.But Dell still recommends Window$