Dell PCs: Now with Ubuntu Linux

[Mooney]

May 24, 2007 (IDG News Service) -- 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.

 

Dell announced what flavor of Linux it would use in the PCs, Ubuntu 7.04, earlier this month. It's the same OS Michael Dell, the chairman and CEO of the company, uses on his Dell Precision M90 laptop at home.

 

The three PCs all use Intel Corp. Core 2 Duo microprocessors. The two desktops contain 1G byte of RAM and 250G bytes of hard disk space, while the laptop includes 512M bytes of RAM and an 80G byte hard disk drive.

Source

[BlackKnight]

Hmm.. this is going to come and bite Dell in the arse. People could go ahead and install Linux if they wanted to anyway, and this just gives Dell's support service an extra headache.

[Ghosty]

The point is you wont have to pay for windows. which will knock of at least a few hundred dollars. And if you never wanted linux, just grab your personal copy of 2000 and go for it!

[Mooney]

The point is you wont have to pay for windows. which will knock of at least a few hundred dollars.

Actually, it only seems to have taken off $50.

[Jitway]

Dells at Walmart will kill Dell off once and for all. I know people swear by them for their tech support but I can tell you of tech support hell cases from people that have bought them and their techs were about educated as a monkey.

[Weirdy]

and this just gives Dell's support service an extra headache.

I don't know

 

I mean, I think it would be a lot easier for the tech support to just create a bash or perl script (with a gui) and email it to a customer to identify a problem rather than giving the idiot customer some bash commands to enter inside of a terminal.