Maybe they have to special order the incendiary devices AKA

batteries.They keep having to send them back what do they

use in the mean time.

Didn't you just download an iso image, burn it on a disk, and install it on one of your current machines. It is pretty trivial to resize an existing partition to make some space for Linux, and set up dual booting... like point and click trivial under K/Ubuntu.

"since it's mostly meant as an ISV thang."

Typo or as thas a new englash word I haven't heard of :P

a excuse to order more hardware on the El Reg petty cash if you ask me......good job

if you said "download an iso image and burn it on a disk" to the average desktop/laptop user they'd stare at you blankly and report you to the men in the white coats.

The whole point is that if Linux is ever to make it on the desk top it has to come pre-installed from the major hardware vendors.

Maybe he wanted it loaded with Dell crapware and desktop backgrounds...

"thang"

oh dear

I've installed Unudtu on a number of dell laptops (from CP300 to D400) without many problems. Unudtu seems to be really good at picking up a good general driver if a device specific one doesn't exist.

I have had a few problems with the built in partition resizing but nothing that major.

In order to test the Dell Ubuntu delivery & support. Obviously lacking !

... if you're not going to use WIndows why buy it?

Where did your order the scarlett Pimpernell off the Dell Linux Laptop Range?

Maybe he'd really like to see what a laptop Linux is like when all the peripherals, buttons, lights and magic works - out of the box. Without sacrificing a goat, or trawling forums looking for references to your obscure (only issued in Essex, for two weeks) model numbered laptop.

Just imagine....

(I can't)

btw - I use Ubuntu on my laptop and think it's great. But it would be better if Toshiba had kept Linux in mind and ensured my SD card slot and sound card worked properly.

We're a windows customer and have been told to expect a long delay on our latest order. Apparently there are shortages of the glass used to make the screens and Dell are struggling to get enough to meet demand.

Nope, its not just windows "customers", I've been waiting for six weeks for my vista enhanced laptop (yep Ubuntu will be on there too!)

Good point, well presented. Or you could run it in a VMware virtual machine, as was the apparent intention during its development.

there still aren't any Ubuntu dells available on dell.co.uk as far as i can see - might be forever till they actually offer them.

This story has been up for hours and no old timers have questioned 215MB as 'just enough for an OS'? No war stories of installing Unix on a casio watch and binary patching the calculator drivers to get the whole OS down to 3K - including the command line word processor?

No scoffing about how today's lazy programmers are spoilt by cheap RAM and fast processors?

No tearful remembrances of Cobol/LISP/punched cards?

This is a sad day.

"thang" to the best of my knowledge is a southern U.S. thing. I first came across it in a novel by the scifi, mathematician Rudy Rucker. IIRC "thang" featured heavily in his novel "Wet Ware". I suspect thang was/is a legitimate pronunciation in wide use. I like it. I like that thang.

Sounds like JEOS may be a response to Fastscale's Redhat oriented product.

"to make JeOS wildly available"

How wild?

I was about to buy a new laptop which would have been wiped and loaded with Ubuntu when Dell announced their pre-installed option was available in the UK so I went for that.

To be fair they did warn me of a 2 week lead time before I placed the order which was then revised to four working days when I got the confirmation and it was delivered on time.

The best thing is that it does all work out of the box: wireless, modem, sound, card reader and even the media buttons on the front. My only complaint was that the screen resolution wasn't set to widescreen by default.

Also, no Dell cra@pware or backgrounds - just vanilla Ubuntu - the only Dell branding was a localhost alias in the host file of dell.linuxdev.us.dell.com.

It's now much easier to find the Ubuntu models on the UK Dell site - use the search box to search for "linux" or "ubuntu" and it's right there with a picture of Tux. It's also there on the dropdown menus for desktops and notebooks under "Open-source PCs".

Sorry to hear the *nix laptop is taking so long ... Dell usually ships very quickly.

Simple solution: Get a 'doze box with max memory, sell the COA on Ebay, load *nix yourself.

Just make sure you get XP, you probably won't be able to sell Vista to anyone with more than a quarter of a brain.

Folks, if anyone is really into efficient virtualization, then just say no to Ubuntu and VMware: ALT Linux 4.0 Server includes both OpenVZ-enabled kernel and management tools, and the basic image which is really "just enough" is 22M archived, 64M deployed.

Then one has apt-get to install any packages that are needed on that particular virtual appliance, or if there are many of them to deploy, there's "spt" tool to prepare custom "template cache" tarball with all the required packages already included.

See for yourself:

http://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/4.0/Server/current/iso/

ftp://ftp.linux.kiev.ua/pub/Linux/ALT/4.0/Server/current/iso/

http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/contrib/

--

Michael Shigorin