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Ubuntu Businesses Linux

How Ubuntu Linux Snuck Into High-End Dell Laptops (zdnet.com) 48

Linus Torvalds has said he bought a Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux for his daughter. Now ZDNet shares some trivia from the history of "the most well-known Linux laptop," citing a presentation by Barton George, Dell Technologies' Developer Community manager, at the Linux/open-source conference All Things Open: First, however, you should know that Dell has supported Linux desktops and laptops since the middle 2000s. In 2006, Michael Dell told me that Dell would be the first major PC vendor to release and support desktop Linux — and this proved to be a success. Barton George explained that Dell had always done great volume with these computers. Not volume, like the Windows machines, of course, but enough that Dell has always offered Linux-based — primarily Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) powered — workstations.

Still, none of these machines really appealed to developers... George announced on his personal blog what Dell was planning, and his traffic went from 60 views a day to 15,000. Then, as now, there's a lot of interest in laptops that come with Linux ready to go... Dell got together with Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, to make sure all the drivers were in place for a top-notch Ubuntu Linux developer desktop experience. Indeed, the name 'Project Sputnik' is a nod to Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO. A decade before the project itself, Shuttleworth had spent eight days orbiting the Earth in a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. George and the crew decided "Soyuz" didn't have an inspiring ring to it, so the company went with "Sputnik" instead.

George continued: "We announced a beta program for the machine with a 10% off offer. We thought, well, we'll probably get 300 people. Instead, we got 6,000. This is where senior management said OK, you've got something real."

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How Ubuntu Linux Snuck Into High-End Dell Laptops

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  • ty microsoft for pushing all manufacturers into messing with the deep sleep state.........so now the battery drains in a few hrs .
    • by g2racer ( 258096 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @03:45PM (#63942461) Homepage

      You mean you don't want your PC to work like your phone and immediately wake when you get a notification on Teams ;)

      • by lsllll ( 830002 )
        I shit you not, true story here. One day a guy at work pulls me aside and says "Hey, I have an idea that I think is gonna be a winner" or something to that effect. He makes me promise not to tell anybody else about it. He then proceed to tell me "You know how your phone can blink a light when you have a notification, but the screen is off?" "Yeah," I replied. "Well, the problem is that when you turn your phone off completely, then there's no way for it to notify you that someone sent you a message. So
        • Well as an electrical engineer I can tell you that your phone is really never off unless you run the battery flat

          So thanks for being yet another software douche that doesn't understand one single thing you are being paid to write garbage for

          • by lsllll ( 830002 )
            Don't act like a jerk. Everyone knows about the baseband processor and O/S. Is it technically possible to do what he wanted? I suppose so, via exploiting a zero-day vulnerability for something like this, but doing so would defeat 1) turning off your phone and 2) conserving battery since your phone's radio would have to constantly check for "messages" and then flash some LED or something else, all of which take battery. Hell, you may as well just leave your phone on! I say zero-day vulnerabilities becau
          • I would argue that âoeoffâ still means you are not connected to any networks and your screen is not going to light up and sound is not going to come out of your speaker. so how would you do this under those conditions? Off has to mean something and it is a condition of the proposed idea.

    • Amazing how far BACKWARDS Dell has come.

      See: https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

      * Feb 1992 Linux runs fine (except for swapping) on a Dell 235D (25Mhz 386).

      * Oct 1994 Dell employees help thier customers run Linux on Notebooks with a footnote that"In this isolated instance these are indeed the opinions of my employer"

      * Jun 1995 Dell tests Linux on Notebooks and notes to potential customers "OS/2 Warp is supported. Linux isn't officially supported but unofficially, it works fine. I've been using these machines for over a year... I'm on the notebook design team at Dell.".

      * Mar 1998 Ralph Nader sends a letter to Michael Dell requesting pre-installed Linux "after learning that Dell and other OEMs were reluctant to offer a Linux client PC on the grounds that it would harm the OEM's relationship with Microsoft."

      * Aug 2000 Michael Dell says "configurations of all Dell products are now designed, tested and certified for Linux. Our factories can now customize each system -- from PCs to servers -- with Linux. "

      * Sep 2005 Dell introduced a notebook with pre-installed Linux for the French market.

      * Jan 2007 Dell introduced a notebook with pre-installed Linux in China.

      It'd be nice to see Dell provide as much support as they did in the 1990s.

      • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @10:16PM (#63942887)

        >"It'd be nice to see Dell provide as much support as they did in the 1990s."

        I think over the years, MS has put HUGE pressure on them to limit Linux support; like they have with most large computer makers. All kinds of anti-competitive crap.

        • Agreed. I've bought 2 Dell laptops with Linux pre-installed and have been very happy. Now, I want a third but where the hell are they on the (UK) website?

          Dell, take my money for crying out loud!

          I suspect Dell don't want to offend Microsoft and you really have to search hard for Linux laptops.

        • I think you are exactly right with that assumption.

          Like back before Linux became big, when Windows 95 already was and IBM OS/2 was still a thing, and Microsoft blackmailed IBM with the threat of stopping Windows sales to their PC division unless their Software division stopped marketing OS/2 to end users. Which IBM's software division then did, and the rest is history. The fact only came to light incidentally, years later in one of the few major competition cases against Microsoft, which was about something

  • You put a laptop on sale for 10% off and of course it's going to sell - regardless of the OS.

    I have appreciated that Dell has supported Linux on its machines for quite some time. I just wish their hardware was more reliable (nothing to do with the OS - we run into a lot of issues with Dells running Windows too).

    • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @04:30PM (#63942533)

      >"I have appreciated that Dell has supported Linux on its machines for quite some time."

      Two years ago I was replacing several large servers. I considered Dell, along with others. My impression was a lack of good support of Linux. I ended up with HP again.

      Not that I am terribly impressed with HP's Linux "support" either, since, at the time, they listed only RHEL (which is now poison to me) Oracle Linux (ditto), SuSE (zero experience), and ClearOS (zero interest) . Looks like they have expanded some, with Ubuntu now listed, and "community enterprise linux" (with with no directly support matrix). But Debian is missing, which is stupid.

      In any case, HP's important stuff is already baked into all the kernels. You just have to worry if they will hang up on you if you call in for the included HP support on the server, if you are using some unusual Linux.

      https://techlibrary.hpe.com/us... [hpe.com]

      As for laptops, I have always gone with Lenovo Thinkpads. They seem to just work with Linux very well. Just bought another less than a year ago, an AMD X13 gen3- was a relatively new model and 100% of everything just worked. I don't care if Linux is not preloaded... installing Mint is easy. You just often can't buy the model of choice without the "Microsoft Tax".

      • by W2k ( 540424 )
        The company I works for runs HP workstations on Ubuntu. Works great. The only issues I've had are with the discrete nVidia graphics, which uses proprietary drivers that work great - when they work. Even the smallest kernel update seems to make them crap out in a big way. It's kind of unfortunate that you can't run a high-end workstation on Linux without these issues, but fortunately, I can live with an older kernel.
        • On my home workstation I have Nvidia and running Mint on it for over a year now. Probably 10+ kernel updates and it has never broken (Mint supports it, so I don't have to do anything). But it is a very old card. ZOTAC Fanless GeForce GT 730 ($56!).

          I don't game, so I don't care much about how slow or fast 3D graphics is. I bought it 8 years ago, and it was kinda old even new. I specifically wanted a fanless (quiet and reliable) model, after having had several other cards' fans die and cause lots of hass

      • I've always had some sort of struggle with Linux on HP servers, usually around control of a raid card or something. Dell servers have been awesome since about a year into the r*10 series which started rough but when dell released firmwares to 'unlock' raid controllers and hard drives it's been great since, with good software support for the components.

        That doesn't mean Dell is supporting the software, which is an important point to make, but I've always run a linux friendly if not focused network so had in

      • by DMJC ( 682799 )
        Debian works perfectly on HP. I have a Zbook Firefly G9 and everything worked out of the box on Debian. Install took seconds, all drivers just worked.
        • Oh, I am sure it would.

          But now what happens when there is a hardware problem and HP asks which Linux and you say "Debian"? That does happen. I was using AlmaLinux with an issue, the few times I have ever called them, and they insisted I replicate the issue with RHEL (which I did, of course). It was a huge waste of time. Won't go into the details, since that is not important.

    • by lsllll ( 830002 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @04:35PM (#63942555)
      To be fair, I'm doubtful Manufacturers would be paying more than a few dollars for OEM Windows on their units. Just recently I built two computers and needed Windows licenses. Found plenty of sites that sold full license for Windows 11 for about $25. If I can get a full license for that, then manufacturers probably aren't paying more than $10 for their licenses. Hell! Microsoft may even be giving it to them for lower in fear of just what Dell has been doing.
      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot&worf,net> on Saturday October 21, 2023 @05:37PM (#63942625)

        To be fair, I'm doubtful Manufacturers would be paying more than a few dollars for OEM Windows on their units. Just recently I built two computers and needed Windows licenses. Found plenty of sites that sold full license for Windows 11 for about $25. If I can get a full license for that, then manufacturers probably aren't paying more than $10 for their licenses. Hell! Microsoft may even be giving it to them for lower in fear of just what Dell has been doing.

        No, they're paying around that much for the license. What offsets the cost is all the other stuff - McAfee, Symantec pay good money to be pre-installed, as do many other companies. In the end, the software pre-load is probably subsidizing the cost of the hardware.

        As for Ubuntu, I attribute it to basically being a "default Linux that generally works on desktop". I don't care what you think, but I just went through a rather annoying deployment process because everyone develops on Ubuntu. But our production machiens run CentOS 7 (manufacturing production). I spent a week getting the software deployment to work on CentOS - getting all the required software that needed to be installed , well, installed, or compiled, because yay, what are common packages on Ubuntu are not found in RPM. Even worse was having to compile kernel modules that were needed as part of the manufacturing process. And not just once, but three times, because we had to set up a CentOS dev environment to see what was needed, a test machine to try our deployment of CentOS specific things, then rebuild them for the actual versions installed in production.

        We gave strong hints to consider upgrading because this kind of support was really more of a make-work project than anything.

        I could possibly understand it if these were front line machines exposed to the Internet, but no, they were machines used during the manufacture of our product, on an isolated network

        • >"well, installed, or compiled, because yay, what are common packages on Ubuntu are not found in RPM."

          They might be in RPM, but not in the repos that RHEL/clone uses. Still, you have to go searching for them and dealing with dependencies and such. It is a pain. But making it easier is just turning on the equivalent Fedora repos and everything will be there. I know it is cheating, but, whatever. :)

          Over time, more and more packages are dropped from RHEL/clone repos. I guess because having them would m

      • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @10:29PM (#63942893)

        >"Found plenty of sites that sold full license for Windows 11 for about $25."

        But are they legit?

        The real price is something like $200.
        https://www.cdw.com/product/wi... [cdw.com]

        Typically, anything a lot cheaper is just paying for pirated stuff or illegally reselling unused OEM licenses. Not that I know much about MS-Windows (all my systems run Linux).

        Even the legit but OEM-only license (with lots of restrictions) is $160

        https://www.amazon.com/Microso... [amazon.com]

        • No, no they are not genius ... every one of those keys get kicked off in 6 months

        • by lsllll ( 830002 )
          I do believe WIndows communicates the license number you enter to Microsoft to validate it. I know this because just recently I had a very unpleasant conversation with Microsoft tech support after I changed my processor and MB and tried to activate Windows 11 (which I did not have to reinstall) with the old license number I had, but it wouldn't take it, even though it was a valid Windows 10 license (which Windows 11 was supposed to be a free upgrade for). So, if the installation process communicates with
      • by Teun ( 17872 )
        Two months ago I was looking for a new Thinkpad laptop and to my great surprise a few were offered without any OS but €150 cheaper...
        These days most corporate MS things work via a Chrome based browser I use Chromium on Kubuntu Linux but just to be sure I would not be caught out I did buy the version including Win11.
        So far I only boot into Win11 for it's updates, all other corporate tools like Zoom, Webex, Teams and even Office 365 work on Linux.

        What surprised me is the support for firmware updates
        • I have never had a "office" grade Dell laptop or desktop not run Linux well, and I've been using 'em at work for 25 years. In fact, I'm using one of our old out-of-warranty machines here at the house nice Dell Precision workstation of some type... running pure Debian

      • The reality is probably that Microsoft can force any hardware manufacturer to accept whatever terms they want, including potentially illegal anti-competitive side conditions, lest Microsoft would stop letting them sell Windows at all. Just as Microsoft did with IBM and OS/2, back when the latter still existed and IBM also still made PCs, as was revealed in one of the big competition cases against Microsoft.

      • To be fair, I'm doubtful Manufacturers would be paying more than a few dollars for OEM Windows on their units.

        And you'd be wrong any time in the past 2 decades. Even in the days of Windows 7 the OEM bulk purchase license for pre-installs was $50. The days of $5 windows licenses ended with a legal dispute in the 90s.

        You can see this in action on any website that offers the same identical machine with multiple flavours, and you'll find the non-Windows flavour is typically around 150EUR cheaper than the Windows 11 one. Do you think OEMs are absorbing a 10-15% cost of the device by giving you a discounted laptop simply

        • by Anonymous Coward

          You can see this in action on any website that offers the same identical machine with multiple flavours, and you'll find the non-Windows flavour is typically around 150EUR cheaper than the Windows 11 one. Do you think OEMs are absorbing a 10-15% cost of the device by giving you a discounted laptop simply because you're not using Windows?

          As others have said, manufactures are likely making extra money off the other software (trial versions) that's bundled with their Windows installs, that makes it odd that the price difference isn't smaller. You shouldn't ignore the possibility that they are gouging users on the cost of Windows installs. That said, there are multiple legit methods of getting Windows for free, in fact, even Microsoft gives away Windows with slightly less functionality for free. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/get-wind [tomshardware.com]

    • You put a laptop on sale for 10% off and of course it's going to sell

      EEE PCs with Linux were cheaper than with Windows, in some cases perhaps around 10%, but they never sold well even though they were surprisingly easy to source. (I had a 701, and the last thing I ran on it was Jolicloud.)

    • The hardware quality is huge. I have destroyed so many Dells dragging them in backpacks to worksites I wonâ(TM)t buy them anymore. Meanwhile my 11 year old MacBook Air is happily running Linux with stains and burns. 4 times the life means 1/4th the yearly cost, I buy Apple products now, but dont care for their OS. If any of these PC makers had a similar rugged metal body and quality hardware that also looks ok in a classy office setting, like Apple, I think they would get a lot of customers back.

  • I bought one of these (and later another, and now still use one for the travel laptop, and one for the backup).

    It was fully working out of the box.
    They even got the Synaptics touchpad not to make the mouse run around all over the screen while I typed.
    It was gorgeous.

    19 years later it's still my travel laptop. No TPM, no UEFI, no Microsoft crap, just straight up Dell hardware.

    I did give up on the M1550. The NVIDIA GPU kept burning up and after 3 repair visits Dell replaced it with
    a newer model which had an

  • Bill Veghte Nov 2002 [gotthefacts.org]: “Now, lets interject what I am asking into the picture.. We invest big, big $5 in Dell. We will continue to invest big, big $8 in Dell. I am asking that we do this investment with our eyes wide open. I do not want to invest $8 in Deli to fund their Red Hat efforts. I am asking that:

    a) we be quite prescriptive in our investments with Dell relative to the competitive threats we see with Linux

    b) we constantly benchmark ourselves against the actions that they do with RedHat ..
  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @06:51PM (#63942709) Homepage Journal

    It's so embarrassing to go to school with an operating system your Dad made in a Finnish basement, when all the other kids' parents buy their OS from places like Seattle or Cupertino. ;-)

  • Anyone who really wants one just buys a four+ year old renewed model from 'a reseller' after about 5 minutes of searching the specs for a quarter of the original price and voids the 90 day warranty
  • I bought the first Dell Mini 10 I could get my hands on. It was wonderful. My boss got the same thing but with Windows. Oh dear.
  • There is a law here that says notebooks cannot be sold without an operating system, so to save money, they are often sold with either FreeDOS or Linux. But that does not make them popular. For some reason.

  • I have always bought Thinkpad laptops. Due to eyesight issues I needed to replace my Thinkpad 450s with a new 15 inch laptop. Now, my wife has a Dell XPS 15 laptop running Ubuntu Budgie and it is a very nice machine so I bought the latest XPS 15 for my use. The keyboard is not as good as my old Thinkpad but I can live with it. I dual booted with Ubuntu Budgie and all is well. However, there is one issue that was a pain in the ars – a docking station. With the 450s, I bought a Lenovo dock and it wor
  • For some reason most laptop vendors seem to think that arrows, page up/down, escape and delete are unimportant keys on the keyboard.

    As a developer I want these keys on the keyboard as fully functional, full size, individual keys. No holding down fn, ctrl, alt, shift or any other modifier.

    I want to be able to navigate code, web and the os with these keys.

    As wonderful it is that many laptops are compatible with Ubuntu and similar linuxbased OSes, the actual usecase at least for coding crucially includes a key

    • by pepa65 ( 1924290 )

      Indeed! Looking at you, ASUS TUF F17... No PageUp/PageDown keys, while there are even 2 empty spaces on the top-left&right of the arrow keys..!

      Luckily I mostly use an external keyboard.

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