and fails to get interest for linux to average users. Keep linux were it belongs - in the server room.

probably find no one could find them as they were not directly accessible off the main laptop page or not available as a configurable option when specifying the machines...

the online equivalent of hiding the item in a locked cupboard in the basement behind a door marked beware of the leopard...

anyroad, their loss as I'm getting a nice new Acer Aspire One with Linux on it this weekend from a high street shop of all places... Currys... they'll get my dosh instead...

I tried to fine one on their site when I was looking for a linux laptop. If they were selling them they were doing a better job of hiding it than Dell, and I thought that was bad!

> Keep linux were it belongs - in the server room.

Keep it where it belongs, on the desktop, server, and mobile devices.

Get back to your VISTA desktop saddo

As a dedicated Thinkpad-er, who only uses Linux (SuSE, Mandriva, Debian & Mint) they've got a bit of cheek.

The Thinkpads they sold were not exactly the bee-knees as far as my needs are concerned and finding the link to the Linux spec'd machines was a task in itself .

They've also screwed the pooch by dropping 4x3 screens and with the new T400 & T500 keyboards... come back IBM. Please!

Don't know what I'm going to do when I have to upgrade my current T60.

The preloaded it with <a> (or <a'>) linux but of course I want it with <b> or <b'> linux! Eejits!

Insert any combination of a few hundred flavours. And that's with either the <a> or the <b> the more hardcore (think gentoo) or softcore (think suse).

In slackware or gentoo I don't want to know how much struggling will ensue for Lenovo to get all little thingymajiggies going (thumprint reader? hibernate-on-close? 3g-dongles?), with ubuntu or suse you get disparaging remarks (from people who can supposedly put their hardcore version on it themselves in a flash, so what's their point?).

Same here: I've been trying to find the Linux loaded laptops on Lenovo's web site and have completely failed. So Lenovo have discovered that actively hiding products you sell from prospective customers is a good way NOT to sell them. Who would have thought?

I have given up on the idea of finding the elusive mythological Linux box from Dell.

I also wish they'd made a bigger noise that they were ever shipping Linux. What we need are big manufacturers like Lenovo to make good quallity, supported releases in Ubunutu and Kubuntu, and I would be first in the queue. Like the guy above said, the Dell offering was lamentable - a cut-down, half-baked shadow of the real distribution. It's difficult to believe there isn't a major market for that.

...it could just be that, with a number of makers of small laptops choosing to include their own flavour of Linux, those people who do want Linux preinstalled just don't want Lenovo, and decided to go for an Asus, Acer or HP instead.

It could be Linux, but it could also be Lenovo...

Had a non-tech colleague buy a laptop and mobile broadband bundle from Carphone Whorehouse. The laptop had linux but had no drivers for the dongle modem! My colleague is now fighting a hard battle to get CW to put a copy of Windows on the laptop at no extra cost, CW want 120 for an XP home license! The argument is that it was sold not fit for purpose". This sort of thing doesn't help the linux image, makes it look like it's Linux at fault, not the incompetence of the bandwagon jumping CW mob.

Your colleague was right - CW are not fit for purpose. Of course it doesnt help the linux image - its not meant to! I install Linux on just about anything going with very few compatability problems - you have to go out of your way to find something thats incompatible.

Though it could be that, after all these years of MS, people really dont know jack about computers any more.

Will have to see how that goes - I may end up swapping a bunch of Windows annoyances for a set of Linux annoyances (or incompatibilities) - hopefully not though! :)

Sheesh! This old FUD again. Either you haven't actually tried to find Linux on the Dell website or you are an idiot. (Probably both)

1. Go to the Dell website and type 'linux' into the search box. Top result is link to the Ubuntu range.

2. Select 'Desktops' or 'Laptops' from the 'Products' site menu and there are items for 'Open Source PCs (Linux)'

If you can't do that you fail at teh intertubes.

Why am I sad? Because I want something that I don't have to search for hours to find solutions to problems and end up dealing with people like you in the forums? Or because when I get home I want to switch on and USE my computer instead of spending hours tweaking and patching, dropping to the command line, editing text files etc. I spend all day at work doing that and getting paid for it. I don't want to have to do it home as I have a life and have much better things to be doing. (but I also have a girlfriend - that mythical being that most linux enthusiasts will never know the joys of). I enjoy having to be all techy at work, but at home I want things easy - as do 99% of all home users.

PS: I run both XP and Vista at home, and as someone who knows what they are doing have NEVER had a problem with either that isn't fixable in less than 5 mins.

There weren't any stairs, and the lights were broken.

I have fantasy shopping trips quite regularly to Lenovo, they were far from obvious!

The Lenovo offerings weren't hidden, you just accessed them in a different way than you were expecting - the Linux guys should be comfortable with that...

Given up so quickly? It's amazing what a 30 sec Google search can do.

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

But did they advertise it? Or would advertising the Linux version for home use upset Microsoft?

Anyone know how to buy Lenovo in the UK without paying ridiculous prices? I love their hardware but the only sane way to buy it (as a consumer) in the UK is second hand. I know about Insight - their prices are insulting.

I usually find it under "Home & Home Office", then down to the "PC Operating Systems" list on the left. Not prominent, of course, but not so terrible either...

My wife uses linux. I wish I could tell you what I got when I installed it but this is allegedly a family-friendly forum, so I'll leave it up to your obviously rather skewed imagination.

Incidentally:

"I run both XP and Vista at home, and as someone who knows what they are doing have NEVER had a problem with either that isn't fixable in less than 5 mins."

I run various flavours of Linux and windows at home and, as someone who knows what they are doing, never have a problem with any of them that wasn't fixable within five minutes. The key point is: someone who knows what they are doing. I know what I'm doing with windows and linux (and I could probably hak it in OSX, too, though I hate the thing - personal reasons, read nothing into it). Linux, in my view, is easier to maintain than Windows largely because it presents all the configuration files in relatively easy to read text format, usually organised in an easy to manage way, rather than forcing you to go into the registry and search for things like HK_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/whatever/{1231211b12318a8zxz89a7sa9-32h98ad98h32h97dhq8dq3qdq}/configuration or muck about with the security policy doodad or, you know, whatever. Maybe people like to do things that way. I don't particularly care.

Most users faced with a problem with their computer will either: call in help, or go visit a forum on the intertubes. That doesn't matter if it's linux or windows, or whatever OS happens to be out there, they'll most likely find a forum or a website and say "It's broke!". Or are you saying that Windows has some sort of magical cure system built in that automatically plays soothing music while a Microsoft representative oozes out of the monitor to examine and repair any problems you might have?

All this "windows is easier to get fixed" rubbish is meaningless. Maybe when windows came with a manual the size of a small moon - back when it was still a window manager on top of MS DOS - you might have had a point. But it doesn't. People go on the internet to fix their problems and they will do exactly the same thing when they're using Linux.

Or, if they're my wife, they'll come and ask me. Not that she's ever needed to. I'm tempted to make it break on purpose so I can get the credit for making it work again.

Calm down folks, as a linux user i agree that there are few problems which are not solved within 5 minutes (or was that vista you were talking about)...

Either way, each to their own. Its bit inflammatory to say that linux only belongs in the server room when most people's router in their home is running linux silently.

I also want things to just work at home and i use linux at home and have a mac too.

That way i can get things to just work.

Regarding the story, I think that although these companies are selling linux per-installed they are promoting it or supporting it. This is sad for linux as newbies are not confident enough to try it and vets prefer to do it themselves.

As a side note, i wouldn't buy lenovo anyway, thinkpads were great but lenovo sounds like a cowboys brand to me... i know totally irrational.

I bought one -- a T61 -- with SLED 10. I never could get SLED 10 to boot, but that did not matter, I wanted Fedora on it. (Fedora 9 works wonderfully on it.)

I wanted a Linux Thinkpad, but I did not want to pay the Microsoft Tax, so it worked out perfectly.

There was not any place on their site which said "this way to the linux laptops", as I recall, it was an option after I had narrowed my choice to T-series.

Absolutely, don't want Linux to get too popular. It's one of the reasons the bad boys don't bother targetting it.

My kids love their ubuntu machine - lots of lovely eye candy and stacks of games, all for free. Pity they can't share exe files with friends though (not).

I never found a lenovo with Linux, but my new dell laptop was also hard to find - saved me £55 over the windows version. And I don't need to splash for additional anti-virus/spyware/malware trash that most ordinary users seem compelled to use.

No one in their right mind would run that shit!

SIGH!.......

For a Huawei E220...

Go here and download:

https://forge.betavine.net/frs/download.php/269/vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux-2.0.beta3-ALL-i386-installer.run

install as root

Add the user who will use the vodafone app to the vmc group

rmmode usb_storage

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x1001

or

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x1003

(the later it's more common now)

vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux

and you have 3G in any operator (despite the fact the app been sponsored by Vodafone)

This worked in 10 seconds after doing a search of 5 minutes...

Now try the same 3G card working in a computer with Vista registered in a Active Directory...

Blame them. It's easier. No, but seriously, they've had huge dealings with China for a long time now including dinners and all sorts of corporate/government ass kissing. China is a huge threat to Windows as Linux gains ground there so seeing a Chinese manufacturer who has had a long history of putting Linux FAR on the backburner, as described by several commenters above about it being harder to find on their website than Dell Linux machines are on theirs, so seeing any companies converting to one platform or another (even though they aren't fully converting) shouldn't come as a surprise. Certain companies will choose to push Linux on their front pages, others will tuck it away and pray that that will appease the MS overlords, others won't even dare at all. This is definitely to be expected in some cases, but you'd hope that overall, most places will eventually give consumers more and more of what they want. Until then I hope the EU sues M$ into yesterday for taking away consumer choice in a variety of ways.

But, you know, it could just be market correction after all, though I really don't see the big deal financially from selling something online if you sell other things online too. To add one more item to be available online as well seems extremely trivial to me.

And for anyone not wanting Linux to get popular: grow up please. If your use of Linux is simply because it's NOT popular, that's pathetic, and you should think about using things because, you know, you actually like them and there are good reasons to, not because of what anyone else thinks of you for doing so. Don't remind me of being back in high school, I'd like to think most Register readers are more mature than that. As for the virus/spyware/etc reasons, Linux needs to be targeted for that so any of those ways to abuse Linux will be patched. Open source loves competition and attacks, because that's what makes you grow. It's the closed source vendors who piss themselves if they get targeted because they don't have the world behind them to help them out.

I would argue that Lenovo have not yet actually built it. Dell might just have done with their netbook offering.

I have an X60S and a thinkstation S10. Both run linux. Neither came with it installed. The laptop has an onboard EVDO modem which I spent some time trying to get working properly and never finished - Verizon was not too interested in explaining to me how to use it to talk to them. Now I typically use the linux at home and the Win install for the office. Overall, it's been fine, and my impression is that if I really needed to, I could get the antenna working. A laptop is a box I expect to reboot regularly, so going back and forth is not a big thing.

The thinkstation has been a bit of an embarrassment. The boss ponied up quite a lot of dough for this damn thing. We get it in and discover that the RAID array won't work under Linux. Lenovo are still using a 45 cent winraid chipset on this thing. Long after it's been made clear that the only OS which can actually use this crap onboard "RAID" is Windows, and not always then.

No one at Lenovo in presales mentions this KB article:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=SF07-D0129

So at some point I'll be ordering in a SATA RAID board, but need to wait while everyone forgets just how much this box cost.

At least compiz beryl works nicely on the monitors I have hanging off of it. Even our jaded technicians thought that was cute when they saw it. And it makes it oh, so much easier to LOOK like I'm doing work, regardless of what I'm actually doing.

I run Ubuntu on my Lenovo X61 and it runs faultlessly. I love it. Everything just works. As with most Distros, adding and removing software is a breeze.

Many live Linux Distros also run well and identify the hardware without any problems.

So far as I can see, Lenovo are not offering the X61 with Linux installed.

Just like GM ... they put out a fine electric vehicle (EV1), got lots of places to install paddle-chargers and everything, leased a few hundred to the masses as a test, saw the "want one" list grow to unmanageable proportions, then canceled the whole program because only a couple of hundred people had leased them ... all of the available cars. GM claimed "lack of interest", demanded every lessee give the car back to them, and crushed them.

Give Tux a Chance! (Or, as Yoko would say ... "Gib Bwah unh Shaaaa!")

@AC 14:07 http://linuxcertified.com/linux_laptops.html

Haha.

I remember being young once as well.

You'll get over it - don't worry.

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 on an old P4 laptop, nuking XPsp2 in the process. I know (basically) dick about Linux and got it working straight after the install. It picked up all the hardware, wireless USB, extra-fangly-dangly "media" keys; everything. I must say, I was stunned. I was expecting unarmed combat with bash scripts. Nope. I just worked.

I fed it a wifi USB dongle, and unlike Windows which had a hairy blue fit with the same dongle, Ubuntu gave it a great big hug and asked which network I wanted to connect to. No drivers, not ini files, no crap. Lovely.

I then decided that I wanted gizmos. Real productivity tools like wobbly windows, y'know, the essentials. To do this I used the Ubuntu equivalent of on-line Microsoft Supprt (i.e. the forums). Took me about 30 mins for this "essential" work. Not too bad really.

I now have a pretty speedy laptop which does everything I want, and I look forward to learning more about Linux and how the various windowing apps etc. all hang together.

Comparing Linux to Windows, I would say there are three main differences:

1) Windows tries to blur the line between the OS and apps. People think their window or media player is the app. Linux does not do this. The OS is the OS and the windowing system is just an application on top. That takes a bit of a mental shift.

2) Linux documentation assumes a fairly high level of competence and is not beginner friendly. Not that beginners really want to hack Linux, but there are times when I wish the install docs were a bit more clear on exactly what I have to do to install an app, not just say "Download tar and install"

3) Variations. The are more flavours of Linux than you can shake a stick at and this can be daunting. Which one do I choose? Will this guide for SUSE 10.3 help me with Red Hat 9? There is a similar issue in the Windows world, it just isn't as pronounced.

Finally, the vendors. Yes, Dell do sell Linux kit, but it is not easy to find (not as easy as the Windows kit anyway) and it is almost as if they are embarrassed by it. Which is a shame, because from my current experience with this old laptop, Ubuntu knocks socks off XP (and probably Vista too).

a bare metal option???

Make it £70 cheaper than with an OS, and we can get OEM XP or Ubuntu, whatever and install it without all the crap that comes pre-loaded these days anyway.

Ooh, you want RAID eh ,but without a RAID hardware adapter?

Have a look at ZFS - it's only really [IE proper reliably] working on Solaris at the moment as far as I am aware, but there are *nix ports in the works.

Allows you to have RAID-esque redundancy without RAID hardware. Currently looking at my desktop tower with four hard disks in it [two IDE, two RAID0 SATA] and seeing possibilities...

Here's a good start:

http://flux.org.uk/howto/solaris/zfs_tutorial_01

Steven R

Perhaps what they need to do is offer their standard range but have the option to not have any software installed at point of sale (the fact that this really annoys Microsoft is a bonus). That way I can install my preferred Linux distribution instead of whatever they choose. I did once buy a Dell laptop and promptly removed the Windows install in favour of Linux, otherwise I've always put together my own machines.

However, I understand that I'm definitely not part of the mainstream retail customer base, but perhaps that's generally true of most of the Linux crowd. We're different because we know what we want and they've failed to offer it.

FreeBSD has software RAID (gmirror).

Plug the dongle in, open up "Mobile Broadband". Create a profile and press connect. Along with the laptop comes setup from GeekSquad. If your friend wants to pick up the phone and dial the number for being talked through it then it will work.

If only you linux evangelists devoted as much effort to understanding the reasons why people aren't buying linux loaded laptops than to complain about decisions such as this.

But then again when efforts are made to improving the linux desktops like Sun's "Human Interface Guidlines" for the Gnome Desktop and Red Hat's uniting "Blue Curve" theme for both the Gnome and KDE desktops you either deride them or completely ignore them.

The real difference between linux and windoze?

The user communities

Almost every linux user forum and community is filled with "Get back to your VISTA desktop saddo" type arseholes.

Ever have a problem with Linux? complete newbie to *nix?

Expect stupid comments, more stupid responses and unhelpful replies, certainlly don't expect anything helpful.

As a user I really don't want to have to learn how to recompile an OS just to get my wifi card working ( I am being facetious). I certainly don't want to have to respond to fricking purile comments in "geeks" only forums.

Hate windows, hate linux smart arses more. This is why linux will never break a consumer market.

To get a cheap Linux laptop, you buy a Windows one. Software manufacturers will actually pay hardware people to get their <del>trash</del> Valuable Merchandise preloaded on their boxes. This makes hardware cheaper. So you buy one of these boxes, boot it up with the Umbongo CD already in the drive, scrub the disks from top to bottom (Recovery partition? What's that for?) and soon you'll have a system that's usable.

You get a cheap box that's so ridiculously overspecced that even Vista runs on it, the software peddlers get the warm fuzzy feeling that someone out there may be using their junk, Microsoft gets another Imaginary Happy Vista User. Everybody happy!

Linux users don't want laptops, or any other PCs, with Linux pre-installed. We all have our favorite distribution and disk partition schemes, so "one size fits all" doesn't, especially if we're paying for it. Installing Linux is quick and easy, since it's not encumbered with the DRM and other anti-copying schemes that Microsoft inflict on their users.

What we most want is a option to buy a system without paying the Windows tax - i.e. a "No Operating System" click-box giving £50 or so knocked off the price.

The next most important thing is avoiding hardware for which open-source drivers do not exist. If chip manufacturers find that the reason their chips do not sell is that someone else's competing chip DOES work with linux, they'll open up.

Any manufacturer that does these two things in perpetuity and has a decent track record for reliability will gain many orders from Linux users.

Raid: Linux has had software raid (0,1,5) for more than 10 years. It's slower than hardware raid but it works - and there's a hell of a lot of supposed "raid" kit out there which simply patches bios to do raid in the CPU, not in the hardware.

Dell: last time I looked the issue with Dell's Linux arena wasn't the Linux support (it's fine on servers and their support desk actually works, amazing!) but the laughable range of 2+ year old certified hardware with limited memory ranges and pathetic video controllers that was all that was available in desktop ranges.

Having to buy their specific distro didn't go down well when we already have site agreements in place either. Needless to say they don't get to sell us desktop hardware (Linux OR Windows, companies which pull this kind of thing don't get to benefit from our business)

Thumbs down because it was impossible to actually GET Lenovo linux notebooks despite them being on the website...

Odd - you must have rather an abrasive way of writing messages on the forums. I am a total Linux newb and have only had great help from the Ubuntu forums.

ffrankmccaffery

You are correct, to an extent. There are quite a few Linux luvvies who seem to attack any attempt to make the OS more appealing to non-experts (like me). But for those kind of uber-geeks there's always Slackware. Me, I just want to get he computer into a state where I am productive.

So we've had

"keep it in the server room" - and the GF in the kitchen?

"spending hours tweaking and patching, dropping to the command line, editing text files etc." - straight from the Windows troll scriptbook - hardly ever necessary now, but older Windows users can remember editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get their soundcards and games working - tsk, youth of today...

"Almost every linux user forum and community is filled with "Get back to your VISTA desktop saddo" type *rseholes." - might have been true pre-Ubuntu but not now

"As a user I really don't want to have to learn how to recompile an OS just to get my wifi card working " - well maybe, but unless the wifi card manufacturer provides open documentation their kit will only work initally with the OS they designed it for - and I'm rooting for the little guy/gal who reverse-engineers it and makes it work with other OS's

"I enjoy having to be all techy at work, but at home I want things easy - as do 99% of all home users" - and you call yourself a techy?

I too was once a Microserf, tugging my forelock and clapping at every crumb from the top table, but I got bored with the whole thing because it was too easy, yet too spun beyond belief. I have a Vista machine bought very cheap at home, but compared to the Linux machines I have it's all flash and no substance - worse, it's like a gorgeous woman flashing at you and then doing a Captain Jack with a chip and pin terminal when you show any interest. And there's more locks and straps under the flashy dress than in a bondage party.

"Hate windows, hate linux smart arses more. " - I predict you'll grow to hate Windows more and more. Meanwhile, on with the revolution. :wq!

I think the reasoning behind the winraid rants are that you're supposedly paying for hardware RAID, but getting stuck with something that basically does what your OS can already do! BSD has SW RAID, Linux has it too, and hell, even Windows has it!

However, as expected; the Windows RAID solution requires using the "dynamic disk" option, which changes the partition table format and basically turns it into a "windows only" HDD.

Here's the thing: I didn't want software raid. I wanted hardware raid. Work dropped quite a bit of dough on this box in part because it claimed it had hardware RAID and in part because it claimed it support Linux. And in part because it's barking fast.

Now, I find that it has RAID, but only if you install Windows, and that Lenovo doesn't mention that up front.

Also, the build quality on Lenovo has really dropped through the floor. One of the drives popped 3 weeks in (granted, that's actually a Seagate problem, but why buy drives from Seagate and not insist on top-end QC for the money they're charging?) One fo the SATA retainers pulled clean off the motherboard when I needed to pull the cable following the drive implosion. A workmate's X61 came in the door with a flaking display connector and the SD card reader failed out of the gate.

But, this is why we bring these things in with a three year onsite repair plan. Because at the end of the day, even for the spendy gear, anything that isn't fitted into racking rails (and a disappointing amount of what is) is ultimately designed to consumer whitebox spec. Anything but the laptops we're happy to fix ourselves, given parts. The laptops, we'll let them pay someone to drive out and sort.

Next workstation I buy, I'm likley to recommend HP. I've always liked their design. Weird proprietary parts - but designed to actually do things internally. Some of the old Vectras had some really clever p/s fan placement.

Whoops. I'm dating myself. Time to get a tissue.

I was told that several manufactures have entered an agreement with Microsoft

and have designed their system to only boot on XP or higher.

I went thru 4 machines from Best Buy in the U.S. before I found one that didn't cause

problems trying to install Linux. They said to expect to see it get worse

with the new agreement with BIOS and motherboard manufacturers.

for prospective buyers to find, according to what I have read.

Is there a cunning plan in there somewhere, or just more bureaucratic bungling.