Dell flirts with the Linux desktop

Desktop Linux ^ | Feb. 23, 2006 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

Is Dell is on its way to becoming the first tier-one PC vendor to offer a mainstream business Linux desktop to US customers? It's starting to look that way.

In the recent past, Dell has toyed with shipping a Linux-powered PC to the US market. But, when push came to shove, the results -- a Dimension E510n PC shipped with an empty hard drive, a copy of the obscure, open-source FreeDOS operating system and no support if you did install Linux -- were less then impressive.

It's a different story for so-called workstations priced nearly as cheaply as desktops. Dell has started advertising a trio of affordable workstations with RHEL WS 4 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation 4) preinstalled.

[Knitebane]

I believe that we're wasting our time with you. However, we'll continue to post answers to your questions, not to help you, but to point out that answers to almost every question exist for those that really want them.

You've already made up your mind that there's something wrong with Linux and nothing posted here is going to change that.

If you were really interested you'd poke around and find the answers yourself.

Or you'd go download a Live CD and test whether your hardware works or not. But you're not going to do that.

Most likely because you wouldn't have anything left to complain about, and we can't have that, now can we?

ATI support is handled by ATI. The R420 chipset is well supported, both with the internal Xorg driver and the ATI driver. Where they fall down, generally the TV-Out parts, the GATOS Project has TV-Out support for most ATI cards, including the AIW.

And you could have known this after a 5 minute search, or after booting up a Live CD.

As far as running Windows apps on Linux, it's possible. Silly, but possible. Other posters have directed you at the various flavors of Wine, Crossover Office and such.

[Echo Talon]

i'll look into it again sometime, maybe its better now

[When_Penguins_Attack]

You can d/l the VMwareplayer and a free virtual machine of Ubuntu, and if you are fairly computure savvy you can make it work.

I think Linuxlovers forget how daunting it seems to make the switch, though. Windows users are used to doing things a certain way on the desktop, and the simpler we make that first transition for them, the less likely they will be to say "Well, I tried it and I just never could figure out how to ......, so I gave up." That is why I like Linspire, Xandros (which I have only briefly used and never installed on my machine) and of course, Mepis. I have heard Mandriva is good for newbies, but never used it. Xandros and Mepis are KDE based, and SIMPLE to use. The interface is alot like they are used to and the support is really good. Linspire and Xandros, though, are not free. I dunno if Mandriva has a live cd...., which leaves, of course Mepis. I use Fedora on a file server (It "spans" a bunch of smaller scsi drives into one partition, which I could never get Mepis to do easily), but Mepis is my baby.

I have a VMwareplayer on an xp laptop, with the Ubuntu virtual machine, but I don't think a gnome desktop is a very good place to start for a newbie. JMO, but the collection of really nice widgets for games, faxing, scanning, email, websurfing, syncing palm pilot, printing, ftp downloading, disk burning, watching movies, etc in a KDE distro like Mepis is a slam dunk choice for a windows user looking around.

Heh. I feel like a skag dealer conspiring with another one "Let's just powder the candy we give em. We get em good and strung out and they will be hooked....."

[When_Penguins_Attack]

Good Lord! Slax is like Gentoo! Might as well tell you to just sit down and write all the drivers yourself. I like Knoppix ok, but it was not NEARLY as user friendly as some of the others mentioned (Linspire, Xandros, Mepis, Mandriva) for the new user.

It does have a neat little deal that, if you have a bunch of ram, you can load the whole os into ram. It is amusing to see how fast it runs. Beyond that, I dont care much for it.

[Echo Talon]

I tried Knoppix and couldnt get the network working, I will try that mepsis you told me about. Im gonna give it a shot on this laptop and I hope that it has WIFI support, otherwise im gonna have to reinstall windows.

[When_Penguins_Attack]

I tried Knoppix and couldnt get the network working, I will try that mepsis you told me about. Im gonna give it a shot on this laptop and I hope that it has WIFI support, otherwise im gonna have to reinstall windows.

Well, STARTING with a laptop needing wifi is like a 60 year old man who is 50 poounds overweight announcing he is going to get in shape by running a marathon. Wifi can be a bear. My advice is to do nothing till you know if the card is one that you can get to work EASILY with linux. Otherwise, you will just say...."I tried the ()&*(&#@ thing TWICE and could not get it to work."

Post the kind of card you have and I will try and help. Of course, I have seen mepis pick it right up and not need any drivers installed at all (more than I can say for XP, by the way!).

[relictele]

I use both Redhat and a variety of Windows versions as do many client sites. I don't have a dog in the fight except that I don't understand why pro-Linux/anti-Windows users are usually so militant and want one monoculture replaced by another (differing versions of Linux notwithstanding).

Here's one of the only gripes I have with the Linux crowd: in their zeal to promote open source and/or destroy Microsoft, the urge to include condescending 'zingers' in almost every piece of advice seems irresistible. If they aren't stated openly, they are certainly implied.

Being an advocate and an enthusiastic user is fine but constantly slamming MS, its products and its user base will continue to fail to win friends and influence people.

[When_Penguins_Attack]

Here are some linux helps for new users:

Some downloadable books in HTML, mags, paper books. The downloadables are easily downloadable, easily browsable and bookmarkable:

First on the list:

Tux magazine. www.tuxmagazine.com. Breezy, chatty, simple to read in pdf format. You can d/l the archives. A definite first read and very informative.

The Linux Cookbook Click format if you can find an archive(use google) and print format (on amazon). An OReilly Book

www.tuxfiles.org

www.linuxcommand.org

Moving to the Linux Business Desktop at amazon (or any bookstore)

I heard one guy say that this free online course was worth his time. It is a downloadable (pdf or html) course on the fundamentals of linux.

[When_Penguins_Attack]

Being an advocate and an enthusiastic user is fine but constantly slamming MS, its products and its user base will continue to fail to win friends and influence people.

Good point. Ever hear of Steve Ballmer?

[relictele]

Good point. Ever hear of Steve Ballmer?

Again, I am NOT an MS advocate and they certainly don't need my defense - if they did I would expect a check. Ballmer has certainly made his share of enemies and his act wore thin a long time ago. But....to repeat my point internalizing 'The Battle' and making it personal is a turn-off for the less-technical users.

[When_Penguins_Attack]

Again, I am NOT an MS advocate and they certainly don't need my defense - if they did I would expect a check. Ballmer has certainly made his share of enemies and his act wore thin a long time ago. But....to repeat my point internalizing 'The Battle' and making it personal is a turn-off for the less-technical users.

Actually, I agree. I use linux because I LIKE it. Of course, LIKING it invariably has to be linked to liking it compared to WHAT? Linux has to be compared to windows, as they own the market for desktops at present. The fact is that the internet is a hive for dyspeptic, socially retarded curmudgeons, so any discussions on the relative merits of either system is bound to degenerate into a howling bunch of banshees. Just look at most any forum here on FR......, and it is one of the better venues.

Nevertheless, your point is well taken.

[antiRepublicrat]

Moreover, the Dell salespeople said that any software or hardware installed, but not purchased through Dell, would void the warranty.

That's some strange BS coming from those people within Dell, and it probably violates some warranty laws. What they probably meant is that they can't support someone on other software they've installed, and, knowing how helpdesks work, will probably blame that software for any unrelated problem you come up with.

Dell now offers Linux as much as the market desires it since Microsoft stopped effectively forcing them to sell only Windows.

[antiRepublicrat]

USASOC Staff Orientation CourseLinux is fine for people who are very PC savvy, but the average user cannot get it to work as well as Windows.

I've always wanted to do a test. Get three groups of people, each with about the same very low-level of computer ability. Each group has a broadband router (DHCP on) and a free ethernet cable sitting there. Give one group a consumer-level Dell with Windows, another Linux (pick a vendor) and another an Apple iMac.

Then sit back and watch who gets set up first, who gets on the 'net , writes some letters, sends some email, and gets hit with any kind of virus first, and of course who takes a sledge hammer to their new box first (have sledge hammer prepositioned next to the desk).

[youngtechster]

I haven't actually had the opportunity to use WiFi except on other people's computers, but I have a few friends that have tried to use various forms of Linux over the time.

The best distro I've found for new users is probably Suse or Ubuntu.

As far as laptops and most desktop computer users they'll be better off with Ubuntu. Google has been rumored to start a linux development based on Ubuntu (they're calling it goobuntu). The only reasoning I can think that they would do this is for their mindshare/marketshare, and in order to do that they'd need to take some of microsoft's share away (i can hear ballmer throwing chairs), which would require an ease of use and a learning curve that either matches or beats that of the windows desktop solution. Ubuntu makes sense for that task. It picks up drivers for sound (which is rare), mice, and some off the wall video cards (which is even more rare).

As far as server/workstation setups I have used Red Hat in the past, but recently I have found Suse to be a lot easier to work with. YaST is EXCELLENT for administrative tasks as well as easy configuration. Everybody is different.

I have all sorts of distros ranging from Gentoo to Ubuntu Live. Red Hat was my first venture, and left me fairly impressed with linux as a whole. but still had some kinks that I wasn't ready for. Here's a list of all the distro's I've worked with: RedHat9, Fedora Core 3&4, Suse 9, College Linux (Slackware based), Gentoo 2005.0, FreeBSD, Server Optimized Linux, and Knoppix (incl. STD).

If you are an experienced user I'd reccommend using Gentoo or even wandering into the FreeBSD realm. These distros are definetely not for those that aren't willing to spend some time to get to know the distro.

[rzeznikj at stout]

Slax normally automatically detects the internet connection--the only problems I've ran into with internet and Slax were computers with dial-up connections.

I'm not 100% sure about Knoppix, though the few times I've used it--it detected my Internet connection (DSL).

And if I've had any problems with the internet, I ran man ifconfig, read through the options,

If worst comes to worst, I boot the host OS (usually Windows), make sure the Internet is running under Windows, and write down the IP addy, DNS servers, etc. and plug them in manually using ifconfig.

man ifconfig (the manual/help page for ifconfig provides syntax--where all your data is supposed to go as well as possible options.

[TChris]

Dell routinely "leaks" stories like this, that they are considering this and that, to gain more leverage in negotiations. They "consider" going to AMD processors to put more pressure on Intel for price concessions. I'm guessing they're "considering" Linux to put pressure on Microsoft over the price of Windows et al.

The day Dell actually SELLS and PROMOTES machines with AMD processors or Linux O/S, I'll probably faint.

[Echo Talon]

that was probably my problem before, ifconfig. who knows im gonna download one of the distros someone told me about later before i go bed.

[rzeznikj at stout]

Slax is derived from Slackware. It's designed to be small and simple--though logging into the system and manually starting the GUI from command line can be a little scary for a Windows user.

Never tried Gentoo--though I hear the next version will have a liveCD (plus installer available) =)

I don't use it when I need WiFi--it's labor-intensive and can a real PITA to properly set up (you need to d/l driver and occasionally library modules from the Slax Webpage and install them to the iso).

Landlines such as dsl, ethernet, etc. work fine and are usually detected automatically, especially if the connection uses DHCP.

[rzeznikj at stout]

It was strange--when I ended up trying Slackware and to get the connection rolling

Though if you're looking to install a distro to the disk, and you don't have a lot of experience with Linux--I'd personally recommend Suse.

[Echo Talon]

someone recomended mepsis.. that any good?