Lenovo to Sell, Support Linux on ThinkPads

Pengo writes "Lenovo has announced that they will begin selling T-series ThinkPads with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 pre-installed beginning sometime during the fourth quarter. In addition to supplying the hardware support, Lenovo will also handle OS support for ThinkPad customers, with Novell providing software updates. 'Unlike Dell, which has targeted its Linux offering primarily at the enthusiast community, Lenovo's SLED laptops are targeted at the enterprise. Whether they are running Ubuntu, SLED, or some other distribution, the availability of Linux pre-installation from mainstream vendors increases the visibility of the operating system and gives component makers an incentive to provide better Linux drivers and hardware support. If Lenovo is willing to collaborate with the Linux development community to improve the Linux laptop user experience, it will be a big win for all Linux users, not just the ones who buy laptops from Lenovo.'"

This is great, if...

[Anonymous Coward]

you want to support Microsoft and their deal with Novell. May I suggest a boycott?

Re:Finally!

[Seismologist]

I'm eating lunch (in left hand) and typing (with right hand), how is that for an insightful response to this for insightful posting.

Note to moderator, I recommend the "insightful" tag for this response.

Re:Well

[Eddi3]

Not only that; If more people run Linux, more hardware vendors will be willing to make drivers for their products. This is a Good Thing.

Vista?

[DoofusOfDeath]

My gut reaction is that Vista's poor reception helped make this happen. Partly because of poor customer demand, and partly because it forced Lenovo and Dell to look elsewhere for product differentiation.

Am I right?

This is a Good Thing (tm)

[Ngarrang]

Some may deride Novell for their deal with Microsoft, but Lenovo is targeting the corporate world, not OS Holy War advocates. In the corporate world, big businesses want certainty, even in the face of possibly-baseless claims. IMHO, the two most important places to target with Linux are businesses and schools. People will tend to use at home what they are around at school or work. Not all, but most. Familiarity breeds sales. Regarding schools, target the K-12 school systems.

Dell, HP/Compaq, Lenovo/IBM...these are the big three that the Linux community needs to really push the off-the-shelf sale. The sales of these three dwarf all of the rest of the competition.

Thus, I say bring it on, Lenovo! Soon, all of the other 1st and 2nd tier vendors will fall into the new order of the world or risk being left behind.

Re:This is great, if...

[Mistlefoot]

I have mod points right now and small part of me wanted to Mod you down. I really do try not to mod people down because their opinions differ from mine though so here I am posting.

Small steps in the wrong direction aren't good steps. They actually get you further from your goal.
While I am not certain that this is actually in the wrong direction - I do know that the Novell - Microsoft agreement is NOT THE RIGHT direction.

Losing does not justify making bad decisions.

Note as well that losing is your word. I did not realize that have a plethora of available software packages and alternatives meant losing. If you mean that the OS community is smaller then Microsoft then I'll agree. But when I want to run a LAMP server or toss Ubuntu on my new box I can do that.

I do have the freedom to choose. Agreements like the Novell - Microsoft agreement lead towards losing many of those freedoms.

Re:Big mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, my old Apple laser printer doesn't work with my Windows XP Thinkpad. Should I call Lenovo and complain? Also, my Atari 2600 Joystick doesn't work either. What a defect!

Or maybe printers that require Windows XP... require Windows XP. There's no reason for this to be a problem. If you're too dumb to figure out what's not compatible before purchase, then buy a Mac or WebTV or something easy like that.

I'm pretty sure the wifi adaptor built in to the laptop will work, though.

Re:Vista?

[Eddi3]

No. But Vista is relevant to alienation. This has been driving people away from Windows, and in some cases, into Linux.

Re:This is a Good Thing (tm)

[Control Group]

IMHO, the two most important places to target with Linux are businesses and schools.

...and you shouldn't bother with schools.

No, really.

Apple tried that (might still be trying it, for all I know), and it didn't make any difference. When I was in K-8 (eighties), you would have been hard-pressed to find a non-Apple product in any of the classrooms. When I was in HS (90-94), the school computer lab had only Macs. Our two semesters of programming were taught in Pascal on Macs. It wasn't until college that I had a PC computer lab available to me. Didn't make any difference at all.

Why not? Because I didn't make the purchasing decisions for my family. My parents did. And my dad had to use PCs at work. This had nothing to do with what he had grown up using - PCs were thin on the ground when he graduated HS in '67 - but with what his office had purchased. Which means, despite Apple's best efforts at co-opting the brains of America's youth, I learned to use the PC.

Which is why, once the PC was entrenched on the office desktop, that was it. If we want Linux/BSD/HURD/what-have-you to gain widespread adoption, it's the business desktop that we need to target.

why no kde?

[SolusSD]

seriously--- kde was a lot of features that are perfect for desktop users. It is a *very* powerful desktop environment. kparts, widgets, dcop scripting, etc allow programs to work together in ways they simply can't in a gnome/windows/osx environment. konqueror with its kioslaves, allowing you to ftp, sftp, ssh, http, nfs, smb, etc all from one application is a damn powerful application. Its disappointing that dell, and now lenovo are standardizing on a gnome desktop. :(

Re:Well

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

Driver support for Free Software operating systems on laptops is traditionally somewhat hit and miss. If a large manufacturer is providing Linux pre-installed, then this means that they are going to be building laptops out of components that have Linux drivers.

The best part about this is you've got two separate companies (Lenovo and Dell), two different product lines (Thinkpads and Inspirons), and two different distributions of Linux (SUSE and Ubuntu). This means that both companies and both distros will be pushing to get laptop hardware support working well with Linux.

If you've just got Dell trying to buy compatible hardware for a single product line, then good Linux support for each laptop component might only come from a single manufacturer. Now that Lenovo's in the game, they'll be looking for Linux compatibility from their hardware manufacturers' as well; manufacturers which are bound to be different in many cases from Dell's. Let's also not forget software configuration, how many times have you been using one distro and just can't get some piece of hardware to work, you find a solution online, but come to find out it's only if you're using a certain distro with a certain kernel version.

This situation means better hardware support for everyone no matter the distro or company (or lack there of).

Differentiation

[fishthegeek]

It's all about differentiating product. After a decade of mono-culture in the OEM world commoditization happened, and the OEMs suffered excruciatingly low profit margins as a result.

With Vista sales at a blisteringly mediocre pace and consumers increasingly met with nearly identical machines at identical prices from identical companies with identically poor support where else can the OEMs turn?
We've seen M. Dell mention publicly that he would distribute OS X if he could, and Apple will never do that. Linux provides for the utmost extreme example of potential product differentiation at a nominal cost to the OEM. Most of them will take differing sides in the Flavor-of-the-month club. Dell has chosen Ubuntu, Lenovo has chosen Suse. Who will HP pick? Madriva or Fedora maybe. The OEMs want to sell machines, they need to find new markets and differentiate their products. This is the beginning of a time travelling exercise to about 1986 when CP/M, Commodore's Amiga, and DOS were but a few of the possible business and consumer choices out there. MS did some great things in introducing a common platform for development and such, but I think that world+dog realizes that homogeneous computing has more downsides than ups.

Re:Well

[hackus]

Mmmm.....well almost.

Driver support isn't a question of well, Lenovo is selling laptops with linux preinstalled, maybe we should make a driver!

Historically, the open source community has been very resourceful at making their own drivers, very good ones too.

My response to this would be, "So what!".

What has to change, is patent law before we get great linux drivers for video cards say.

That way, Nvidia and ATI can't sue each other when they find out both are using the others patents.

That won't ever happen, because they have everything locked up tighter than a drum.

My point is, all the manufacturers have to do is open up their hardware.

The open source community can do the rest.

Really we can.

-Hack

Linux and BeOS

[MechaBlue]

At the least, it looks like Linux is becoming viable for the desktop. One of the challenges that Be Inc. faced with their BeOS was that they could not get any mainstream distributor to ship it (this was largely due to the secret contract that Microsoft forced OEMs to sign). Linux appears to have cleared this hurdle with multiple vendors supporting it and even more on the way. It probably won't see the popularity of Mac OS X any time soon, let alone compete with Windows, but it now has the potential to do so.

Areas where there needs to be improvement:
- Advanced file system (i.e., better than FAT32) that Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux understand.
- Major vendors shipping and supporting multi-boot systems. Even better if each OS can run the other(s) in a VM out of the box.

The easier it is for Linux and Windows to interoperate, the faster Linux's market share will grow.

Re:Flip Flop

[Frosty Piss]

Well I remember not too long ago about how Lenovo would not install or support Linux. And the first comment on that page, "They'll come crawling back to us when Vista turns out to be a flop."

I think it's "wishful thinking" based on a desire for Microsoft to "get what's coming to it" on your part to think this has anything at all to do with Vista / Microsoft, and don't forget that XP is still an option with *most* OEMs. This has nothing to to with Microsoft's market share, which unfortunately remains strong. Assuming a great shift in the Dark Side is presumptuous at best.

But it's still a great sign that things are starting to move just a little.

Re:This is a Good Thing (tm)

[cerberusss]

When big businesses want Linux laptops, everybody profits from the drivers for said laptops.

Re:System Administration in the Rabbit's Warren.

[pr0nbot]

Ok, let's say I want to update some software.

In the KDE menu, do I go for Control Center, System > Control Center (YAST), or System > Configuration > Control Center (YAST)?

I'll pick one of the YAST ones.

Ok, now do I go for Software > Online Update, Software > System Update, or Software > Software Management?

I'll go for Software Management.

Ok, now I'm faced with the bizarrest interface I've seen in a long time.

It really shouldn't be this hard. Of course if I switch to Ubuntu/Red Hat/Debian etc I have to learn a completely different way of doing it.

For some things, choice is great. But seriously, for installing software, do we really need a billion systems?

Re:Differentiation

[fishthegeek]

I agree with you. I have a Dell 1505n, and while I love Feisty, the six month cycle is just too freakin quick for OEM's. CentOS would be a good choice indeed.

Re:Yes it is the Year of Linux.

[swimmar132]

Yes, Vista was a complete failure -- it only sold 60 million copies [reuters.com] so far this year. Microsoft will surely never recover, only having 34 billion dollars [microsoft.com] in cash.

If that's not failure, I don't know what is.

Re:This is a Good Thing (tm)

[grcumb]

Some may deride Novell for their deal with Microsoft, but Lenovo is targeting the corporate world, not OS Holy War advocates.

With all due respect, if corporate management would shut up and listen to what those unwashed hippies are actually saying, they might be able to get their collective head out of their ass and realise that the irrational, unrealistic ideologues are the ones in the Brooks Brothers suits.

Free Software is not jihad. It's a rational and well-developed model for sustainable software development. Even a cursory investigation of the FOSS phenomenon makes this abundantly clear. Dismissing the Four Freedoms as inconvenient rhetoric serves no useful purpose whatsoever, unless the corporate strategy is to take from Free Software and never to give back. And that flavour of corporate piracy is an ideology that I personally find a great deal more offensive than Stallman's.

In the corporate world, big businesses want certainty, even in the face of possibly-baseless claims.

I know you're probably offering this as empirical fact, rather than necessarily attempting to validate or justify the idea. But honestly, the utter illogic behind an approach like that is astounding. Enriching one's declared enemy in the hope that they won't attack once strengthened - that's madness.

I believe the proper term for this kind of thing, by the way, is danegeld [wikipedia.org]. Most people do not hold such strategies in very high esteem. English poet Rudyard Kipling, who knew a thing or two about conflict, had a thing or two to say [wikipedia.org] about it.

20, 40, 60, It's all the same when you make it up.

[twitter]

So now they are claiming 60 million by the end of June? That would make 20 million coppies sold in June alone because they were boasting 40 million in May. [slashdot.org] Given that the market is on the order of 230 million a year [pcworld.com], and most people don't want Vista, it's unlikely that many desktops were sold and less likely they all had Vista.

If things were really rosy for M$, you would not see systems with gnu/linux. That you do signals the end of the M$ monopoly.

This is big...if it happens

[dtjohnson]

A few years ago, IBM (Lenovo's Thinkpad predecessor) was saying they would convert all of their enterprise desktops to Linux. Never happened. If Lenovo really does start offering SUSE on a T-series, Thinkpad, it will be a big deal that could start a cascade of non-US desktops to Linux. No wonder, M$ just started offering cut-rate Vista in China. M$ knows how important this is so, though, so the likely outcome is that Microsoft will cut a sweetheart deal with Lenovo and Lenovo will quietly shelve their SUSE plans.