From: "Rich Gauszka" 

unfortunately it appears Dell is only offering hardware support and not
making it easy for a first time Linux person

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/05/dell_ubuntu_pcs.html

Now here’s the money quote from the Dell2Dell blog page, on the technical
details of Dell’s Ubuntu offering:

    "At this time, we are not including any support for proprietary audio or
video codecs that are not already distributed with Ubuntu 7.04. These
include MPEG 1/2/3/4, WMA, WMV, DVD, Quicktime,, etc. We are evaluating
options for providing this support in the future."

This strikes me as a much clearer notice, and one which the less
sophisticated among Dell’s customers would be well served by seeing. I'm
particularly concerned about those who might purchase the Ubuntu boxes with
the expectation that they’ll be able to listen to all their music files and
watch their complete video libraries right out of the box, without having
to do some serious tweaking.

Of course, those familiar with Linux know that drivers which support
proprietary multimedia formats such as the various Windows Media file
types, and Quicktime, are not always easy to come by. True, this isn’t the
fault of the Linux fanboys. It stems from the historical reluctance of the
owners of these formats (Microsoft, in the case of Windows Media) who
haven’t exactly rushed to embrace Linux.

However, the fact that there’s a valid reason for the difficulty in
obtaining some drivers should not be an end user’s problem. (Not a casual
end user that you expect to capture as a Linux customer.) Much like it’s
not a customer’s problem if Windows doesn’t do everything it’s supposed to
correctly, which is why Microsoft makes darn sure to regularly issue
service packs.

By the way, Dell adds some flavor to their original explanation in a new
Dell2Dell blog post put up on Thursday by Lionel Menchaca, digital media
manager at the PC maker.

    "Hardware support will come from Dell. Beyond that, users can turn to
the Linux section of the Dell Community Forum for help and also get the
latest updates from our Linux team at http://linux.dell.com. Users also
have fee-based options for operating system support through Canonical,
including 30-day Get Started, One-year Basic and One-year Standard.

    "As John [Hull, Dell Linux OS manager] said in his post, earlier this
week, initially we will offer a subset of the component options we support
on the three systems. We will continue to work with vendors to improve the
stability of the associated Linux drivers moving forward. That’s part of
our longer-term goal to increase the number of drivers that work at the
kernel level—something Direct2Dell readers made very clear. We’ll get
there, it just takes time."


"Geo."  wrote in message
news:4656532e$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> $1500 for the laptop configured my way. Not bad.
>
> Geo.
>
> "Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
> news:4655bf20$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>> http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132216-c,linux/article.html
>> 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.
>>
>>
>

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