Dell Opens Up About Desktop Linux

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Dell explains his company's Linux desktop strategy in an interview at DesktopLinux.com. He says that it's not practical for Dell (the company) to support numerous distributions due to their incompatibilities, but that he doesn't want alienate large segements of the Linux community by selecting a favorite Linux distro to standardize on (Ubuntu appears to be his favorite, at the moment, by the way.) What he'd really like to see, is for the popular Linux distros to converge on a common core platform, according to the article."

Inspiron runs FC4 fine

[hysma]

After buying a Dell Inspiron 600m sometime in the summer I figured what the heck and installed Fedora Core on it. A few months down the road I've managed to get everything (including SPDIF out, TV-out, WLAN, suspend to ram) working. The only thing I haven't had a chance to play with is hot dock and undocking. If I want to either dock or undock, everything must be shut off and rebooted...anything else ends up freezing the system.

Having said that it seems perfectly Dell compatable... would just be nice if tech support would accept my linux-based diagnostic info when contacting them for tech support. I've had one harddrive completely die (replaced next day), but now I have bad sectors and htey won't help me because I'm running an unsupported OS.

Re:Agreements with MS

[stupidfoo]

Why do people keep saying this? The reason that there isn't a large price difference in a Dell system loaded with Linux vs. a Dell system loaded with Windows is that Dell uses commercial Red Hat Linux.

You will save money if you order a Dell with no OS (well, FreeDOS is usually shipped with the system) versus one shipped with XP. You just can't order every system that way.

Re:Inspiron runs FC4 fine

[DDLKermit007]

Solution? Backup your junk, reformat to windows, and play thier game. You have to put it all on another drive anyways.

Re:Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't confuse Ubuntu for Debian - Debian does ship with mp3 support.

Re:Funny

[Tim C]

So, I'm expected to hack about with a product I've paid for in order to get it to work?

No thanks; that's part of the reason I paid the money, so I didn't have to hack about with it.

Re:What I'd like from Dell

[superbondbond]

I haven't really been following things, but I hear that some people get machines with ghost backups of windows instead of a real install CD

Even worse than that, I have a friend who bought a machine from Gateway (actually built by E-machines, I think) that didn't even include a backup image on disc. They gave him 5 CD-Rs, and a utility app installed on the system that allowed him to make his own backup images. Talk about cheap.

Almost more shocking to me, IIRC it took 4 of the 5 discs to make the full backup. I knew these boxes came with a lot of preinstalled bloatware, but sheesh!

Re:Good for you

[GigsVT]

Obviously Dell wants those dollars or he wouldn't even bother with this commentary about it.

Re:Funny

[Omega1045]

The parent post is on-target. And it is not like Dell is not supporting Linux at all. Plus, they offer a lot of resources for those machines that do not come with Linux installed: http://linux.dell.com/ [dell.com]

Re:Funny

[GigsVT]

Because what Dell is suggessting is tantamount to the president saying "All these senators and congressmen that don't agree with each other on issues really is hampering things, we need a single person that is the one standard for the government".

It's not the way a democratic republic works, and it's not the way that free software works. Dell can go shit in his hat.

Re:Funny

[jimicus]

It's really sad, too, that those who can fix problems never call in, because they'd be calling in *fixes* not problems.

That doesn't work if the procedures aren't there for the helpdesk in the first place.

eg. Two weeks ago I found a problem which eventually I solved myself. Now, I could ring my ISP and say "Don't know if you're aware of this, but a computer with a fluxquox network card nailed to 10Mbps will, if connected to the internet directly through the cable modem you supply, be damn slow for no apparent reason - even though the Internet connection is significantly slower than 10Mbps so you wouldn't expect it to matter".

They would say "You're having problems connecting to the Internet? Can you reset your PC for me please?"

I'd spend 10 minutes trying to explain to the person on the end of the phone that I'd had problems, I'd figured out what they were and how to solve them, and that this information could be useful to them. Eventually they'd just agree to get me off the phone, but there's no knowledgebase for them to update because all they do is follow the script.

Re:Michael Dell with a bit naive view

[Anonymous Coward]

For a company which has been supplying $300 low end machines with scrap hardware and shady driver, this doesn't make much sense to me. Even with failed venture in Linux market with Red Hat back in 2001, I don't ever recall Dell ever putting any effort in supporting customers half way decent.

You must be on crack. The BIOS on all Dell systems made in the past 4-5 years, maybe longer, can now be updated from Linux. You don't even need to reboot into DOS. Did others put that kind of effort in supporting customers?

Even today, Michael Dell either can't see it or is too naive. One would think, Dell had learned their lesson and support Linux kernel developement and community and not "leading or highly preferred version" distros. However this goes to show, Dell didn't.

That crack must be really good. I suggest you take a look at http://linux.dell.com/ [dell.com] and come back. I'll also point out that half the pages in Dell's Power Solutions magazine talk about Linux. There's still a lot to do, especially on desktops, but Dell has in my opinion been doing a decent job, given the constraints. Everything in my 600m is supported. On my PowerEdge running Fedora, I can even tell which DIMM bank has been causing parity errors. Their engineers have been more helpful than they were required to.

Now, if only they had AMD models...

Re:Funny

[Thuktun]

I'd spend 10 minutes trying to explain to the person on the end of the phone that I'd had problems, I'd figured out what they were and how to solve them, and that this information could be useful to them.

This is usually where I usually try to post to a newsgroup, forum, or blog related to this topic. At least if the information is made available, someone might be able to Google it. If I can't resolve something myself, that's usually the first place I look.

I suspect most slashdotters are in the same boat, where if you've reached the stage of needing someone else's help, you're already beyond the first or second stages of triage that consumer-facing vendor support lines provide.

Re:What I'd like from Dell

[Alef]

It would be cool if Dell could make sure that dual boot people could reinstall windows in a differently sized partition, though -- if they could make sure that you get the installation CDs or whatever else you need to do that. I haven't really been following things, but I hear that some people get machines with ghost backups of windows instead of a real install CD. That sort of thing is a problem from a practical point of view for a linux guy who wants the ability to dual boot.

I am writing this running Gentoo on a Dell that came without any real install CD, as you describe. However, resizing the primary windows partition was easy enough using the GParted LiveCD [sourceforge.net] (which works well even with NTFS partitions). The only thing that bugs me is that the install CD is replaced by "restore partitions" that occupy two of the primary partitions in the partition table.

Re:Funny

[MoneyT]

How does a plethora of distributions affect Dell choosing and supporting one of them? It doesn't. What keeps them from getting inundated with tech support calls regarding fifty different distros right now? Nothing. It's just "Sorry, we don't support that." How would selling and supporting a machine with distro-X on it change that? It wouldn't. Tech support calls for distro-Y just get "Sorry, we don't support that."

Because customers are fucking stupid. I don't mean your average dumbass stupid, I mean belly crawling gutter shit stupid. All the customer is going to know is that they have linux on their computer. As soon as they call in and here "sorry we don't support that distribution" they're going to be pissed because to the customer is Linux. It's not RedHat Linux, it's not Ubuntu Linux, it's not SuSE linux. The customer doesn't give a shit who made the distribution all they know is that it's Linux and dell sells boxes with linux and they want support.

Ask anyone who works in tech support how suprisingly common it is for people to not understand such simple concepts.

Re:He's got the right idea.

[ookaze]

Like it or not, the reason Microsoft has a foothold on the desktop market is because of its relative ease of use

Posts beginning with 'like it or not' are usually trolls, and yours is a big example of that.
I still wonder how you people can come up with nonsense like that, when here, the problem is that no desktop Linux on Dell is easily available.
You're talking about steps that are far far away from the basics we're talking there. This is everything but insightful.

A worker or home user can by taught the basics of checking their e-mail, writing documents, etc. in Windows and Office via memorization

As here, I fail to see how what you describe is ease of use.

They learned Office 95 back in the day, that training investment carries over to the latest version with just a few add-ons

This go on in a big troll. Apparently, you genuinely think that people trained in Office 95 can use Office 2000 or XP or 2003 or 12 just the same.
I can because I'm used to find my way on Windows, someone who learnt through memorization just can't.
Well, I can just say you're hopeless if you really think they can without retraining.

Companies do not want to invest money retraining their staff

And yet they have to for every new version of Office.

Make it "just work." Windows' big strength is that I can go to CompUSA, buy any old crappy piece of hardware, plug it in, and have it work without having to load kernel modules, edit config files, etc.

You finally caught up to the topic, that precisely what we are talking about, and what distro already do pretty well, but still need support from vendors like Dell.

Standardize it. Pick an office suite. Pick a window manager. Pick _a few_ of the hundreds of obscure GNU applications and bundle them as a standard tool set. Wrap in some administration and deployment tools that are brain-dead simple to use. No normal user wants three office suites, four window managers, etc.

Have you used a Linux distro since 2000 ?

Completely hide the guts from the end user unless they want to see it. Mac OS does a great job of this. I have the command line and access to the config files if I want it, but the GUI is more than adequate to tweak most items

Same question as before. Basically, try to talk about things that are not already done, please.

Dell's other big market is home users. The same rules apply, just more so. Home users do not have the patience to learn Linux internals. My advice would be to start with an Ubuntu-like base, and go to work making the OS just work for normal users.

HP already did that with Ubuntu, Dell could do it too. If you thought your idea was novelty, let me tell you you're years behind.

Re:I agree with Mr Dell

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because there's only one media player
http://www.download.com/Media-Players/3150-2139_4- 0.html?tag=dir [download.com]

browser
http://www.download.com/Browsers/3150-2356_4-0.htm l?tag=dir [download.com]

e-mail client
http://www.download.com/Clients/3150-2367_4-0.html ?tag=dir [download.com]

word processor
http://www.download.com/Word-Processing/3150-2079_ 4-0.html?tag=dir [download.com]

spreadsheet program
http://www.download.com/Spreadsheets/3150-2077_4-0 .html?tag=dir [download.com]

or IM program
http://www.chat.com/?tag=dir [chat.com]

on Windows. Oh wait, you don't know WTF you're talking about!

Re:Funny

[wasabii]

First off, this is slightly inaccurate. There are lots of different program with different requirements for MP3 support. XMMS, as shipped by default, at least for me, plays MP3s. GStreamer based programs, such as Totem and Rhythmbox, do not. However gstreamer is a plugin framework, and the mp3 plugins (gstreamer-mad) are available in alternate locations (non-US). Ubuntu mirrors this for the most part, except their non-US stuff is in multiverse. So, you can install MP3 stuff with the click of a few buttons in the package manager, but it isn't installed by default, because it isn't clearly legal to ship it on CDs. So, yes, it doesn't have MP3 stuff in everything by default, but no, it being a "binary distro" doesn't really factor into this at all. Either way, it's not a binary distro. A simple command will download and recompile the source for any binary package on the system. apt-get source.

Re:Maybe is IS wrong

[salgiza]

United Linux died because of two reasons:

1. One of the founders of United Linux decided to sue IBM. Anyone remembers Caldera/SCO?
2. SuSE, who provided the base of United Linux got bought by Novell.

And no, RPM had nothing to do with it.

It's a shame it disappeared, because thanks to United Linux, distros like Conectiva and Turbolinux had a chance to compete in the same market as SuSE and RedHat (the only companies that IBM, Oracle, etc. usualy support).

Re:Maybe is IS wrong

[Burz]

Not that I've ever had that problem on Redhat or CentOS, but what you describe isn't even due to the RPM package format. And I've never had a problem managing RPMs on a Debian system. It works as a package format.

Ultimately, ALL these distros suffer from the effects of a centralized database that gridlocks users into choices made within the central repository. We must use this hideous kludge called "package manager" because there is no standard definition for desktop Linux where the OS stops and where applications begin.

It does relieve dependency hell... for the simpler installation scenarios. For independantly-distributed software its miserable.

You can read about the upcoming LSB Desktop here:
http://www.linuxbase.org/LSBWiki/DesktopWG [linuxbase.org]

Re:Funny

[Knuckles]

If you don't live in a country where it is legal to use patented/whatever codecs without paying royalties, you can of course still do it at your own risk, which is exactly what you did by doing it in Gentoo, so I fail to see the problem.

FWIW, Debian does include mp3 decoder software (i.e., software that can decode mp3 files to listen to) by default. It takes ca. 5 seconds to know this by googling for debian AND mp3 AND patent AND policy, which brings up this thread [debian.org] as the first link.
This might be too much for a newbie, but you don't qualify because you installed Gentoo. OTOH, a newbie wouldn't even have to google for it, because it works out of the box.

If you mean mp3 encoders (software to produce mp3 files), you are right that they aren't included. It takes 0.29 secs (according to Google) to look for debian AND mp3 AND encoder, which will give you lots of info and debs to download.

I still don't see how you can add MP3 support to KDE when the support has to be compiled into the KDE apps that use it

The wonders of modern software engineering! Did you ever recompile Windows Media Player because you added codecs for ogg, DivX and the 1,000,000 other file formats it can't play out of the box? Thought so.
See, while support might have to be compiled in, to my knowledge all Debian packages do and will gracefully ignore it if the mp3 library is not present. This is true for all proprietary codecs that I am aware of.

If you google for Debian AND codecs or Debian AND "unofficial repository" or Debian AND decss, or whatever, you will see many hits to repositories that you can simply add to /etc/apt/sources list (you can also use, e.g., the newbie-friendly Synaptic). Usually the google hits will include the repository of Christian Marillat [video.free.fr] or, for Ubuntu, of the Penguin Liberation Front [ubuntu-fr.org], who provide packages for users who do not live in legally challenged countries. Then just install what you need with Synaptic or apt-get.

If you live in such a country, you can still run a Debian-based distro, Linspire [linspire.com], which will give you mp3 and video codecs as well as a DVD player, all completely legal even in the US, for a small fee. (There is talk about providing Linspire's Click 'n' Run Warehouse for Ubuntu users too). (Don't believe the myth that Linspire runs everything as root, it is not true [linuxmafia.com]). Anyway, Xandros gives you nearly the same (sans CSS'ed DVD IIRC)