Journalist rehash: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6506027.stm
Thanks to Ernest at the beach.
Meh, it seems to me that most Linux users are of the egghead set and never buy prebuilt for home systems, the laptops will do well(depending on whether Dell is offering the flavor of Linux the user wants) but other than that I doubt Linux will see much of an increase in home penetration because of this move.
Believe it when you see them being delivered. Dell has a habit of promising one thing and delivering another.
I’m pretty sure that Dell will choose one of the “easy-to-use” commercial Linux distros as their choice of OEM Linux. Right now I’m running Xandros 4.0 Home Edition Premium on a 1.4 GHz laptop, and I plan on installing the same on my 2.1 GHz desktop. X4 used to run slow, but I found out on the Xandros forums that there is a bug in the OS that causes it to think that your CPU is running at 10% the actual speed, causing your OS to run at a snail’s pace. (For example, Xandros 4 thought my 1.4 GHz CPU was running at 178 MHz, causing the OS to run slow and lag. But once I followed the easy instructions on the Xandros forums, I rebooted and now it’s running full-speed with no slowdown or lag. The reason I chose X4 Home Premium was I’ve been a loyal user of Xandros since 2004, and X4 comes with Amarok and Digikam out of the box. Plus there’s a lot of great help on the forums and a great Xandros community who build Debian packages of the latest and greatest software. I’ve actually built some packages on Xandros, including a version of the FAAC freeware AAC encoder.