Text 18224, 85 rader
Skriven 2007-05-25 12:16:16 av Rich Gauszka (1:379/45)
  Kommentar till text 18217 av Geo. (1:379/45)
Ärende: Re: Dell ships Ubuntu PCs
=================================
From: "Rich Gauszka" <gauszka@dontspamhotmail.com>

unfortunately it appears Dell is only offering hardware support and not making
it easy for a first time Linux person

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/05/dell_ubuntu_pcs.html

Now here’s the money quote from the Dell2Dell blog page, on the technical
details of Dell’s Ubuntu offering:

    "At this time, we are not including any support for proprietary audio or
video codecs that are not already distributed with Ubuntu 7.04. These include
MPEG 1/2/3/4, WMA, WMV, DVD, Quicktime,, etc. We are evaluating options for
providing this support in the future."

This strikes me as a much clearer notice, and one which the less sophisticated
among Dell’s customers would be well served by seeing. I'm particularly
concerned about those who might purchase the Ubuntu boxes with the expectation
that they’ll be able to listen to all their music files and watch their
complete video libraries right out of the box, without having to do some
serious tweaking.

Of course, those familiar with Linux know that drivers which support
proprietary multimedia formats such as the various Windows Media file types,
and Quicktime, are not always easy to come by. True, this isn’t the fault of
the Linux fanboys. It stems from the historical reluctance of the owners of
these formats (Microsoft, in the case of Windows Media) who haven’t exactly
rushed to embrace Linux.

However, the fact that there’s a valid reason for the difficulty in obtaining
some drivers should not be an end user’s problem. (Not a casual end user that
you expect to capture as a Linux customer.) Much like it’s not a customer’s
problem if Windows doesn’t do everything it’s supposed to correctly, which is
why Microsoft makes darn sure to regularly issue service packs.

By the way, Dell adds some flavor to their original explanation in a new
Dell2Dell blog post put up on Thursday by Lionel Menchaca, digital media
manager at the PC maker.

    "Hardware support will come from Dell. Beyond that, users can turn to
the Linux section of the Dell Community Forum for help and also get the latest
updates from our Linux team at http://linux.dell.com. Users also have fee-based
options for operating system support through Canonical, including 30-day Get
Started, One-year Basic and One-year Standard.

    "As John [Hull, Dell Linux OS manager] said in his post, earlier this
week, initially we will offer a subset of the component options we support on
the three systems. We will continue to work with vendors to improve the
stability of the associated Linux drivers moving forward. That’s part of our
longer-term goal to increase the number of drivers that work at the kernel
level—something Direct2Dell readers made very clear. We’ll get there, it just
takes time."


"Geo." <georger@nls.net> wrote in message news:4656532e$1@w3.nls.net...
> $1500 for the laptop configured my way. Not bad.
>
> Geo.
>
> "Rich Gauszka" <gauszka@dontspamhotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:4655bf20$1@w3.nls.net...
>> http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132216-c,linux/article.html
>> Dell Inc. will officially launch its first three consumer PCs running the
>> Ubuntu 7.04 Linux OS on Thursday, two desktops and an Inspiron E1505n
>> notebook PC.
>>
>> The new models give buyers a third choice when shopping for a PC at Dell:
>> a machine with Windows installed, a machine with no OS, on which they can
>> install one of their choice, and now a machine with Ubuntu Linux already
>> installed. Other PC makers, including Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Lenovo
>> Group Ltd. also sell PCs that run Linux, but mainly on customized
>> machines, because retail demand for the open-source OS is tiny compared
>> to that for Windows.
>>
>> The PCs will be available in the U.S. after 4 p.m. Central Time from
>> Dell's Web site at http://www.dell.com/open. The laptop starts at US$599,
>> while the two desktops, the Dimension E520 and XPS 410n, start from $599
>> and $849 each, respectively. A comparable XPS 410 with Windows Vista
>> Premium costs $899.
>>
>>
>

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