Canonical Chases Deal to Ship Ubuntu Server OS 151
Kurtz'sKompund writes "Canonical, the company that supports Ubuntu Linux, is trying to work out a deal with hardware vendors such as Dell to make Ubuntu available pre-installed on servers. 'Canonical, despite obviously supporting such a deal, had little to do with Dell's decision. Dell said it was merited by customer demand. Likewise, the decision of whether Ubuntu Server will ship pre-installed will be determined the same way.'"
Pre-installed OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Why Ubuntu? (Score:4, Interesting)
The install with netinst is very fast. What takes a long time is all the configuration of the needed services, and customization (backup scripts, various checks and email alerts, etc. In short everything one adds to
Am I not seeing some advantage that a pre-installed Ubuntu would bring? Maybe compatibility with newer hardware. I had to use backports a few times, and that was a hassle. Any other advantage I'm overlooking?
Re:Pre-installed SHOULD mean "working drivers". (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually something I liked from the Compaq SmartStart. You would start your installation with the Compaq CD, tell it which OS, it would create a small drivers partition and manage the installation process setting up the hardware drivers.
Re:Why would there be failures? (Score:4, Interesting)
That seems to be what the GP is talking about in terms of support. On the desktop you'll get questions like "I bought this computer with this newfangled leenooks thingy, how do I play my card game?"
On the server, you get questions that have nothing at all to do with the stupidity of the admin. Like "When the database has written 1 GB of data to the drive, the system stops responding and has to be powercycled causing a lot of data corruption, what's going on?" (true story, the answer is "plug in a PS/2 mouse [64.233.169.104]") Multiply that by however many Dell sells, and the grandparent has a point: can they handle it?
!ElLobo? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have seen in some slashdot stories this !Ellobo , but I have absolutely no idea of what does it mean. Does anyone knows the reference?
Thank you in advance
I disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, for installing on a hard disk, I want to make my own choices in hardware.
Re:I disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pre-installed OS (Score:2, Interesting)
After what you explained we'd have two, different and incompatible Linuxes, RH and Ubuntu.
Unlike for you, the software I use does not run in both RH-3 and (not so old) Ubuntu, the libraries are too different and so are the kernels.
Linux really needs to get "binary compatibility", and so does Linux distros (LSB among others).
Re:I disagree... (Score:4, Interesting)