Dell

It's been a while since I last posted here. Just a short little update on a few things. First of all, I've changed employers; I'm currently developing in Flex, which has been an interesting and fun learning experience. I use Flex Builder 3 as my development Environment, but since the Linux Beta of it is somewhat limited at the moment, I've end up running the Windows version on Windows XP Pro in a virtualbox on my work laptop.

Yeah, I'm a few days late on this. Heck, Dell had launched the systems on Thursday. Actually, this hasn't been too new, as Dell have been selling Red Hat equipped servers for some time (And they even have their own customized Yum repositories for hardware-specific drivers). But this is a very good sign for Linux (and other open source systems) when Dell is willing to sell systems with Ubuntu 7.04 preinstalled!

From Dell's Ideas in Action page on March 28, 2007:

Dell has heard you and we will expand our Linux support beyond our existing servers and Precision workstation line. Our first step in this effort is offering Linux pre-installed on select desktop and notebook systems. We will provide an update in the coming weeks that includes detailed information on which systems we will offer, our testing and certification efforts, and the Linux distribution(s) that will be available. The countdown begins today.

(via Slashdot)
There's been quite a bit activity going on lately about Dell offering Linux preinstalled for desktops and notebooks. First of all, it's the biggest request on the Dell IdeaStorm web page. It even got Mark Shuttleworth to provide a bit of insight on his Blog about having big-named OEMs providing Linux as an option on their systems. Quite a bit of noise about it on Slashdot and Digg, and it's even prompted Dell to put up a survey about certain factors about offering Linux.

Me, I'm not so picky about which distribution they use, because I can install any of them if the system will work for only one of them. This means that I won't have to check hardware compatibility lists for any new hardware.