Dell Provides UBUNTU as an Option
May 1st, 2007 by Don Ray
I see that Dell is once again trying to provide a Linux option and it has chosen UBUNTU as its product of choice. I have UBUNTU running on one PC and have to admit, it is not a bad product. All the world needs is a few more failures from Microsoft, a few more Office suites becoming Internet based and a little more improvement from the Linux support and development community for Linux to make a move on the desktop.
I’ve just switched to Ubuntu 6.1 from SUSE 10.2. While I do miss some of the tools in SUSE (Yast, for example), the Synaptic package manager is great, provided you have a high speed connection. I also find the Gnome UI more difficult to use than KDE, but most Windows users will find Gnome a lot more familiar in the way it works. Personally, I think double-clicking to start a program is a bad ‘feature’ and haven’t yet figured out how to change it to single-click in Gnome. The inability to split a window in Nautilus is also a Windows-inspired PITA.
IF Dell provides Linux computers with everything working, there is a good chance of success, but if users have to learn how to add repositories and download Codecs, and hunt for libraries to listen to music or watch a DVD, this will get nowhere. All of us Linux fans should keep our fingers crossed that Dell does it right.
Hi Henry. I half expected to see you respond to this post after I saw, on your site, that you had installed UBUNTU. I agree that Linux is still a challenge to someone with no technical background, or the interest in fiddling with a system, but once you get it set up right, it will do a good job.
Don Ray / Henry,
I’m really impressed with Ubuntu 7.04. This is the latest distro from Ubuntu which Dell will be loading on their machines. I have it loaded on my laptop, and more things “just work” than ever before.
I really wanted to try 7.04, but had some problems with getting it working. Lots of stuff missing on the menus with Synaptic being the most noticeable. I’m also building a prototype small business Linux box to hopefully sell a few to businesses, so the distro I choose HAS to work right. Unfortunately, 7.04 just isn’t there right now. I will probably regress to 6.06 since it has the longest announced support cycle (2009) of any current Ubuntu releases. (7.04 will be supported only until 2008)
Hi Tuxi - Glad you got 7.04 up and running. I want to do that, but my lunix box has decided to have a problem and isn’t booting. I haven’t had time to find out what is broke.
Henry - Since my box is more for play than real work I will probably go with 7.04. However I have to solve my hardware problem first.