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.'"

about time!

[ianare]

They announced this exactly a year ago [slashdot.org]!

Customer service

[toppavak]

I'm particularly excited about Lenovo handling the OS support themselves, I've owned a thinkpad for several years now and have always had amazingly prompt and effective support from them... My optical drive's tray broke a couple weeks ago, and it took them exactly 4 days to get it fixed from picking up the phone to getting the laptop back in full working order.

Flip Flop

[head_dunce]

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

Ha.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:System Administration in the Rabbit's Warren.

[Constantine XVI]

According to TFS, these machines are targeted at the enteprise. And from the word on the street, YAST is a godsend for networked system management (since YAST handles way more than packages if you haven't noticed).
However, I would appreciate it if someome were to work on a similar product (or a port) to Ubuntu.

Re:Customer service

[Provocateur]

How has the built-in wifi support fared on Linux on Lenovos lately? Were you able to use Linux/OSS drivers, and steered clear of ndiswrapper?

Just curious.

Nice gesture, but Novell is Not Welcome

[Outland Traveller]

No one should support those particular Linux vendors who assist Microsoft in their efforts to deceptively and in bad faith portray Free Software as illegal. Lenovo - How about some Red Hat or Ubuntu offerings?

On the positive side, one can argue that for a Free Software user it's better to pay for Novell's product than Microsoft's, because at least the hardware is more likely going to be compatible with other, more respectable Linux distributions.

A good step forward, but there is much room for improvement.

Improved sensor support?

[whoever57]

I wonder if improved support under Linux for the sensors in IBM/Lenovo laptops will come from this?

A sign of better times?

[drspliff]

Ok so we've all been saying... this year is time for Linux on the desktop, maybe we're finally here.

A combination of Windows Vista flunking and not meeting the needs of consumers (compared to Windows XP), the business requirement to bring down prices (no Windows tax) so their range of laptops can be more competitive with in the market their targeting (basically small businesses and students) means that Linux is starting to become a possibility, considering Ubuntu is often said to be easier to use than Windows XP.

Now, can you seriously consider hardware vendors like Lenovo pushing laptops with Vista pre-installed when they know battery life descreased and the minimum required specs will be seriously increased, driving up the base cost of the machine.

Yeah, I can see where these people are coming from, it's a pure business decision with the side effect of getting the Linux geeks on your side.

Re:One caveat

[bmcage]

Drivers are for kernels, so it might be for every kernel version but not for every distro.
The only thing that can influence the behavior between distro's is if they make a GUI to control the driver (GTK, X, QT, ...), but that stinks in Windows too, so here's to hoping they just give the kernel guys the API, and KDE/Gnome write their own controller in the settings panels.

Re:This is great, if...

[Anarke_Incarnate]

YES, why should we support a company that is spending lots of time and money in making the things you use (Linux/FOSS)better. We should definitely not use ANYTHING from Novell..... /sarcasm.

Yes it is the Year of Linux.

[twitter]

2007 is much more the year of gnu/linux than it is the year of Vista [slashdot.org]. First Dell, now Lenovo. Acer might soon decide their Singapore gnu/linux laptop has a market in the UK and US after all. That would leave HP as the only one of the big four desktop makers who don't sell models with gnu/linux. Driver support for Linux is already good but vendor demand is going to make it better, which is why M$ has done everyting in their power to keep vendors from doing this. Vista is a flop and no one is making money off the upgrade train anymore, so M$ has nothing to offer, vendors have nothing to lose and the M$ death spiral is on.

Death spiral? Yep. They did not have the resources to make Vista modern or even functional. Low sales of Vista have flatlined their revenue, so they will never have the resources to recover. Vendors are defecting and that lowers the likely hood that Vista will ever be ready and reduces their ability to sabotage free software with bogus non standards.

The non free way has finally failed. This will be good for everyone but M$.

Re:Yes it is the Year of Linux.

[twitter]

M$ Fanboy, Macthorpe [slashdot.org] thinks that Vista has captured seven times the market share of gnu/linux:

2007 is much more the year of gnu/linux than it is the year of Vista. Did you deduce that from the statistics that show that Vista is already being used on more than seven times the number of Linux machines?

No, I based it on low sales of Vista and industry disappointment [slashdot.org]. That's not suprising, given the 12% interest in Vista in polls of both business and home users. If those polls are correct, a 5% market share for Vista could only happen if something between 25 and 50% of all computers were replaced in the last six months. That's unlikely, so something is clearly wrong with your little market share boast.

Not even M$'s wildest boasts put Vista on that kind of footing. There are some one billion on internet connected computers in the world. M$ would like people to believe their channel stuffing has sold 20 million copies of Vista, a paltry 2%. Converting that to real users is something I'll let you bother with.

Re:w00t

[iabervon]

Actually, Intel's fault in wifi is looking too far forward. They've got great drivers for their wifi chipsets, which will be in 2.6.23 when it comes out this fall. They're based on the 80211 stack which got into mainline in 2.6.22 (without any of the drivers that use it yet). There's been nothing stopping people from writing great Intel wifi drivers, except that there's been a great driver on the horizon from Intel, and nobody really wanted to tackle writing an obsolete one that could have been merged for a year before being replaced with a better-designed one. (Yes, I have been waiting for a year to be able to use nice all-open-source drivers on my Lenovo laptop with Intel wifi; how could you tell? At least the graphics drivers have actually arrived...)

Re:Well

[TheRaven64]

The really interesting thing about having Linux per-installed is that they can't include binary-blobs that link to the kernel (e.g. ATi and nVidia drivers). If they do, then they lose the right to distribute the kernel (they could install FreeBSD, but it's a bit less buzzword-compliant). They could install the 2D-only drivers and let end-users install the blobs themselves, I suppose, but that wouldn't look good. My guess would be that they will go for Intel GPUs on these lines. If they do, then it will let people asking for documentation from nVidia and ATi something concrete that they can point to and say 'these are sales you have lost by not providing us with the documentation we need to write drivers for your hardware.'

Re:Well

[bfields]

The really interesting thing about having Linux per-installed is that they can't include binary-blobs that link to the kernel (e.g. ATi and nVidia drivers).

I have one of the Ubuntu-preinstalled Dell laptops (the 1420n), and it does include two binary drivers: one for the wireless, and one for the modem. The wireless card is actually supported by free drivers (albeit with non-free firmware) in more recent kernels, just not in the particular kernel supported in Feisty Fawn. Dell is also selling Ubuntu desktops with nVidia video.

It does seem dubious, and hope they'll be able to do better in the future. Oh well.

(For what it's worth, I'm quite happy with this laptop (which I'm posting from). It was nice for once to be able to just take the laptop out of the box, turn it on, and use it, without the usual fuss required to install the OS I actually need. And they seem to be working well with upstream--the factory install seems to be *very* close to a stock Ubuntu installation, so I don't have any worries about it being abandoned.)

Re:Yes it is the Year of Linux.

[Penguinisto]

They did not have the resources to make Vista modern or even functional.

Resources, they had more than enough of. Now things like Skill, Insight, Innovation (the real kind), Design Acumen... those were what they lacked.

IMHO, they also lacked the cojones to tear the guts out of the thing and start from scratch, a'la OSX.

/P