Michael Dell Using Ubuntu Linux At Home

whoever57 sends us a link from the Dell site noting that Michael Dell is using Ubuntu Linux at home (7.04, Feisty Fawn) on a Precision M90 laptop loaded with Openoffice.org and Evolution. If one were betting on which distro Dell will eventually ship pre-installed, this factoid might be food for thought. Oh, and Micheal Dell's gaming system uses XP Media Center edition.

Just an advert

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

It looks like a normal posted flyer.
Given all the other stuff he has I bet the baseline Linux machine will be the toilet one.
Or the one he threatens his kids with:

"Screw around on teh internets and you will use Linux for the rest of the week"

Having said that, its REALLY good Dell are actually selling machines, the specified model just looks crap compared to the other kit on the page.

Re:Just an advert

[BecomingLumberg (949374)]

No, you are missing the point. He had to use the monster PCs for the ones running vista just to get it on the web. The Ubuntu lappy runs fine without a supercharger...

Re:

[gerrysteele (927030)]

Or he's just created a ton of buzz and talk about his company for free.

Re:

[MindStalker (22827)]

Nope, every computer besides the Ubuntu one runs XP or XP Media Center. They are almost all "Vista Ready" though.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

You call this shit:

* Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 Processor
* 4GB DDR2 667Mhz DRAM
* 17" WXGA+ Widescreen LCD
* 160GB 7200rpm SATA hard drive
* 8X DVD +/- RW optical drive
* NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 512MB

That is hardly a damn baseline machine. It is a mobile workstation for crying out loud with a QUADRO! Yes, not great for 3D accel, but they have caught up and I think great 2D accel might be more warranted in Linux anyway. Most people using it that I know are not running crazy 3D games in it. Yes, most the other systems on the page would smoke this, but that hardly is saying much.

I also wouldn't start assuming what systems will have Linux installs, but I will put money that there w

Re:Just an advert

[hswerdfe (569925)]

yah, but it would be nice if google earth would work right.
I have a newish dell laptop with and intel Graphics card running Ubuntu and google Earth has masive drawing errors and is unstable.
I have a 4 year old desktop with as 32Mb NVidia card running Ubuntu and google earth works perfectly.
I don't need 3d for games, but I do need some small amount of 3D. for simple stuff.

Next laptop I buy will have an NVidia card, I hear they are power hungry, and expencive, but at least I will have some form of 3d working.

Re:

[Creepy (93888)]

For clarification/expansion on the original poster's information, the Quadro series is used for 3D accelerated graphics, just not so much games - it is nVidia's chipset for OpenGL acceleration aimed primarily at the Workstation/CAD market and is essentially nVidia's answer to the FireGL cards from ATI (AMD).

Seeing that Linux uses OpenGL for 3D, those cards probably offer better overall performance, at the price of being a bit behind the technology curve from a gamer perspective.

This thing would smoke my des

Re:

[somersault (912633)]

Yeah, because a laptop with a Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM and a Quadro graphics card is utterly crap.. pfft.. I had an M60 for a while and it was great, that M90's specs look pretty awesome to me, and it probably costs more than £2000.. not that I'd want to swap my MacBook Pro for it at the moment anyway.

M90

[G3ckoG33k (647276)]

Is the wonder machine, I also use... :)

However, I am not allowed to use Linux. :(

Dell support would be fine, but corporate policies need to change too.

He is not the only one - Happy Feisty Fawn day!

[Marcion (876801)]

The statistics are biased towards how you buy your computer, rather than what people actually use. How many of those other machines dual boot also?

Businessmen & Their Customers

[eldavojohn (898314)]

If one were betting on which distro Dell will eventually ship pre-installed, this factoid might be food for thought.

I'm going to discard this assumption that because Michael Dell uses Ubuntu that's what they're looking at.

The simple reason being that a good businessman never assumes what's good for him is good for his customer.

However

[Colin Smith (2679)]

The simple reason being that a good businessman never assumes what's good for him is good for his customer.

If you don't eat your own dogfood, how can you expect your customers to.

 

Maybe he ist looking at a course change?

[Lonewolf666 (259450)]

In the past, sticking to Windows seems to have worked for Dell. There are obvious reasons (need to support only one OS) plus maybe a very favourable volume deal by Microsoft.
But as Linux gains more market share, it is time for Dell to re-evaluate this position. Michael Dell using Ubuntu may be part of such research. If so, he is acting with more foresight than some managers I know ;-)

Re:

[prelelat (201821)]

You know I don't know if he would go with Ubuntu on the consumer side, it would be nice its what I use for a regular desktop. But you have to consider that some of their servers ship with Red Hat Enterprise and ask yourself "If I ship a Red Hat type OS with my consumer computers could I get my Enterprise people to train my Consumer call centers?" I don't know if this will be a deciding point, but the fact that he does have call centers trained in RH might factor in.

Re:

[Chandon Seldon (43083)]

How do you even start to generate stats like that? Market share for what?

You could generate meaningful stats for questions like "Market share of desktop PCs sold at Best Buy". Trying to generate stats for the whole "computer" market at once is probably a waste of time.

Re:Businessmen & Their Customers

[Aladrin (926209)]

No, he merely said that he never ASSUMES it is. It might very well BE the best thing for the customer as well as the businessman. You've taken the point in reverse.

He's saying that the fact that M. Dell is using Ubuntu should not play a major factor into what distro Dell decides to ship to its customers. The opposite is not true... If he were to pick a distro AFTER the decision had been made, he may very well choose to use the same distro his company is shipping.

We don't know if that decision has been made, what it is, or why M. Dell chose Ubuntu. Making assumptions on any that is foolhardy at best. But then, that's what journalism means today. Making half-assed assumptions and printing them as fact. When you're wrong, you just write the retraction in tiny print on the billionth page.

Re:Businessmen & Their Customers

[shaitand (626655)]

'For god sake he was fired from the company he started!'

Yeah, the company he led to massive profits. He was fired by VC's and investors who thought a slick oldschool CEO could do better. After nearly going bankrupt and being bailed out by Microsoft of all people they finally brought jobs back. Jobs then led them to the iMac the multi-colored top selling personal computer (to this day as far as I know) and then the IPod and the intel macs.

Yeah, Jobs is a terrible businessman who accidently drives massive profits where 'good businessmen' can't seem to make it fly.

MS tax

[by Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if he can get it without the MS tax?

Re:

[brunascle (994197)]

oddly enough, the no-OS laptops [dell.com] dell is offering cost the same or more than the equivalents with Windows. :-/

i'm looking into getting a linux laptop, and the best deal seems to be to get a dell with windows and load linux onto it yourself (make sure you configure it with linux-friendly hardware, though).

Errmmmm

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Wasn't Feisty Fawn just released this week? If he's been using it, he's either been using the beta or else he just installed it, right? And if Dell were really in talks with Canonical to distribute Ubuntu 7.04 on Dell PCs, wouldn't we be hearing about it from Canonical and/or Mark Shuttleworth?

Re:Errmmmm

[billcopc (196330)]

I hate to feed the rumors, but what other distro would they possibly use ? I don't know of any other that pulls off the user experience schmoozing as cleanly as Ubuntu, seeing as it's one of their main goals. As funny as it would be to toss a Gentoo boot disc in the box and watch the call center agents as they commit suicide one after another:

Joe - " I setup Portage to run off a CDB backend, and now my metadata is corrupt. Fix my box, bitch!"

Kerpal - " Ok, sir, please turn off the computer and remove the power cord for 2 minutes. "

Joe - " No, f*** you that won't fix it. I need a tarball of this and that, and a custom shell script to reindex those..."

Kerpal - " Ok, sir, I am going to put you on hold... (hold music) AAAAAAAAAH *BOOM* *SPLAT* *CLICK*"

Ultimately they want a nice easy distro to appeal to the masses, because that's the business they're in. I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a nice idiot-proof restore CD as well, because the expensive part is training the thousands of tech support people worldwide. Having them pop in a restore disc is an easy way to deal with it, because ultimately that's what a lot of techs end up doing when Windows acts up too... just blow it away and start over. That's how they're trained. Advanced software troubleshooting is a luxury billed by the hour, not covered by the puny hardware warranty.

What?

[wild_berry (448019)]

Why didn't you let the GP read their own interpretation to Mark Shuttleworth's exact words:

derStandard.at: So are we going to get pre-installed Ubuntu on Dell computers?

Mark Shuttleworth: Well - time will tell.

derStandard.at: Are there active talks on that?

Mark Shuttleworth: I would not comment on any conversations underway.

I can see that this isn't (i) a definite 'No' (and nor would it be); (ii) "We'd be delighted if the Dell team want to get in touch"; (iii) "I have their Cease & Desist and Restraining Orders on my office wall -- we'll get Dell to ship Ubuntu, just you see"; or (iv) "We're integrating Wine and Launchpad to track users via the default-installed Dell add-ons". However, I don't think that there's enough there to be sure that it is any hint of talks, as Canonical's and Ubuntu's status would rise if Mark Shuttleworth could give the impression that Dell were interested.

FIVE?!

[ArtDent (83554)]

I can't even imagine why one person would want five PCs.

How much time does he spend applying patches and updating software? Transferring data?

THREE different laptops? Doesn't he realize that the whole appeal of a laptop is that you can take it with you wherever you go?

Re:

[Helios1182 (629010)]

Given that he runs one of the largest PC companies in the world he may just enjoy them and working with them.

Re:

[faloi (738831)]

I can't even imagine why one person would want five PCs.

I can... One PC to act as my home theater, another PC acting as a big ol' server, a corporate approved box that I can use to work from home, a gaming rig, and another laptop to do normal computer-type stuff. And that's not even counting any machines that would be for other people in the house to use.

Re:

[CastrTroy (595695)]

I can see the need too. Unfortunately I don't have all that much space at home. So, I have to have one computer that does absolutely everything I need. That means for right now, I'm running Windows. I would love to be able to run a Linux Server, A Windows Gaming machine, and have a Linux Media centre, and well, for office/internet, I don't care, either one is fine, so I'd probably go with Linux.

Re:

[mgv (198488)]

I can see the need too. Unfortunately I don't have all that much space at home. So, I have to have one computer that does absolutely everything I need. That means for right now, I'm running Windows. I would love to be able to run a Linux Server, A Windows Gaming machine, and have a Linux Media centre, and well, for office/internet, I don't care, either one is fine, so I'd probably go with Linux.


Perhaps a mac mini or two would meet your space requirement. It works for me. You could even go the full monty a

Re:

[Khomar (529552)]

I can't even imagine why one person would want five PCs.

Easy. I have five computers in my house including two laptops. One laptop is for work. One laptop is for my wife, and I also use it when I am watching the kids (I don't usually watch them in my office). One is my file server. One is my primary home machine for things like Quicken and hobby development. My last computer (the admittedly frivolous one) is basically just used for LAN computer games. Here very soon it will be setup to host my childr

Makes perfect sense to me

[Colin Smith (2679)]

It's the easiest to use of the PC based desktop operating systems.

 

Feisty released

[bignickel (931486)]

Although it's not officially announced yet, the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn torrents are live:

Desktop i386 [ubuntu.com]

Desktop AMD64 [ubuntu.com]

Server i386 [ubuntu.com]

Server AMD64 [ubuntu.com]

The more exotic torrents (and the directly downloadable ISOs) can be found at the official release site [ubuntu.com] but I thought we'd try to save their servers a bit of pain and heartache.

Re:

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

I thought we'd try to save their servers a bit of pain and heartache.

Indeed. Thanks a million.

Seriously?

[CastrTroy (595695)]

I really want to know what it is that makes people think Ubuntu is the best thing since sliced bread. I've tried it out, and it's not any better than a lot of other distros. Actually, I find that because they aim too much towards the home user, that it makes it difficult to do more advanced things. Personally, I use Mandriva. I have used it since version 7. I don't see Ubuntu doing anything that Mandriva (or Mandrake) wasn't doing 3 years ago.

Re:Seriously?

[FKnight (521972)]

Who are you to say that Ubuntu is aimed "too much" at the home user? Did you ever think that maybe that's who they're targeting? Every other Linux distribution isn't aimed at all at any variation of a home/average user. The folks at Ubuntu are probably going "gee, duh. Maybe we should make a distribution that you can use without having to have 6 years of sysadmin experience" You're doing the right thing by using a distribution you prefer. It's just a little off base to say that Ubuntu's distribution is aimed "too much" toward home users. Or do you prefer the days when you had to be a computer geek in order to use a computer?

Re:

[TobascoKid (82629)]

Every other Linux distribution isn't aimed at all at any variation of a home/average user.

Linspire????

Re:Seriously?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy (963289)]

I don't see Ubuntu doing anything that Mandriva (or Mandrake) wasn't doing 3 years ago.

Windows Migration Assistant? [michaellarabel.com]

Re:

[porkThreeWays (895269)]

Yes, the secret is out. High quality Linux distributions aren't that much different from each other. I think Ubuntu has come to the forefront because they've got the right advertising, were in the right place at the right time, have a very dedicated community which wants Ubuntu in the most hands, and because it still is a pretty good distribution. That's not to minimize all the hard work that has gone into Ubuntu, but everyone is working hard. Ubuntu just did a lot of non-technical things right as well comb

Oh Boy

[pembo13 (770295)]

Now we'll never hear the end of the "Ubuntu Rocks" guys

Support......

[The Diver (310313)]

How much time does he spend applying patches and updating software? Transferring data?

None. He has support take care of it.

No Vista

[yuna49 (905461)]

While it's interesting that he has an Ubuntu laptop, I'm more surprised that none of the four other machines are running Vista. They're all still using various flavors of XP.

He's smart, why shouldn't he run linux

[by Anonymous Coward]

Just made a living out of selling cheap windows boxes. You seriously think the owners of Mc.D. eat the burgers themselfes aswell? ;-)

Just sounds like a plug for Dell systems nothing

[ScrewTivo (458228)]

more... How much does he use the systems? What are his comments on the various systems? Big whoop he has a computer with Linux on it. He is Mike Dell for gosh sakes.

I used to support executives

[gelfling (6534)]

At a rather large tech company. A small cadre of top honchos had their own groupware server(s!), their own email server(s!) and their own dedicated VPN. They also had instant 24/7 unlimited support wherever they were for any of the multiple home or office machines they used. Their support ratio headcount was 1:1, e.g. each supported person had one FTE dedicated to them.

They simply did not acknowledge that anyone in the organization had any sort of technical problems at all and chalked it up to nerdy whining. Our budgets were routinely slashed, hardware and software was left running long past end of life, capacity planning was a joke and the internal costs for help desk calls and deskside visits were jacked up to absurdly high levels so that no managers would permit their own people to use them. Complaints to senior management were met with not so vague threats of termination, STFU, GBTW!

So if Mike Dell uses uBuntu it's probably because he's imperially disconnected from the realities in his own company. To him, I'm sure he feels that everyone has 5 PC's and full time free dedicated support from the best brains in the industry and what on earth are these peons complaining about now for God's sake?

Re:I used to support executives

[by Anonymous Coward]

Not true in Michael's case. I work at Dell and a couple of stories I heard...(posting AC) (1.5 years ago) IT team is having a meeting and Michael happens to drop in... They are discussing why/ what of some web application. Michael questions why Firefox is not supported...--End result, the whole of Dell has an option to use Mozilla as a supported app. second one, at a newly set-up facility a midlevel manager is showing michael around the lab. we have 5 of these latest computers, 5 of that etc. etc. Michael proceeds to completely open up one of the servers and proceeds to ask "Why are you using test systems on production environment?" turns out that the machines indeed were pre-production...and michael figured it out from the connectors used!!

Soft

[mattr (78516)]

I'd rather see several detailed screenshots per machine with detailed info on exactly what software packages are used, how he likes them, and how, and how much, they are used.

I must be the only one who thinks displays look cooler with something displayed in them.

That said it is almost enough to get me to buy those dual 30" ultrasharp displays. I mean they must be readable if Dell has them at home, right? Just how much do those suckers cost I wonder.. Quality of LCD display is pretty important to me as my eyes need rest.

You all fell for it: this is PR at work....

[postbigbang (761081)]

Oh, gee, Michael Dell, running dog lackey Microsoft/Intel fanboi now uses Ubuntu! See? Dell is really trying to those pesky Linux people! See? Mikey uses one at home, although there is the altar of XP Media Center there just to make sure that Bill's not pissed.

C'mon, folks--- this is PR working at its finest and you're getting sucked right into the nozzle. Dell support for Linux has been scant and waffling for years. Now you're being seduced by the fantasy that The Big Dell actually uses an OSS system. Get real.

Re:

[kisak (524062)]

I agree completely, it has PR written all over it. But then again, it is PR that might as well back-fire on Dell. If Ubuntu is good enough for their boss, why can't we buy it pre-installed from Dell? It is PR to make us linux-fanbois happy, but it can just as well makes us more vocal and bothersom.

Re:

[Paulrothrock (685079)]

It's not OS/X. It's OS X. And it's not "oh ess ex" it's "oh ess ten"

Re:

[Tx (96709)]

Here you go, these links came from linuxtracker, they are definitely the final releases, not the beta.
CD - ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent [linuxtracker.org]
DVD - feisty-dvd-i386.iso.torrent [linuxtracker.org]

Re:How did he download the release so fast?

[Zonk (troll) (1026140)]

Use the Swedish mirror. I switched to that a while ago since the us servers always seem very slow. The Swedish one is usually very fast.

http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/7.04/ [ubuntu.com]

The iso's are on that site now.

Re:

[ross.w (87751)]

Yet you have time to hang out on Slashdot? :)

Just because he has the PC doesn't mean he uses it regularly. He can only drive one car at a time too, but I bet he's got several. Part of the lifestyle of the mega rich. Loads of toys you never get to use.