[ILUG] Interesting piece on Linux adoption from /.

[Niall O Broin]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 03:56:30AM -0600, Stephen_Reilly at dell.com wrote:

> >(though I suppose if you're Ford and you call Dell and you say 'I want
> >30000 XYZZY boxes and I don't want ANY software on them' you might have a
> >slightly better chance of being listened to than your or I have) 
> 
> Actually this kind of service is available to anyone through CFI (DellPlus)

Custom Factory Integration - YAA for CFI (Certified Flight Instructor,
Customer Furnished Item, CAD Framework Initiative are just three others I've
come across). And what value of anyone are we talking about ? I couldn't
manage to get Dell to CFI an American keyboard for me - the reptile said it
wasn't available but I bet if I'd wanted 1000 notebooks it would have been
available :-( - don't suppose you could find a set of U.S. keycaps for an
I8000 Stephen ?

> within Dell. Though it's more likely they would ask for 30000 systems with
> Linux (fav. dist.) preinstalled and configured to taste. There is a minimum

Good point - even someone buying 30000 boxes is likely to prefer that Dell
do that for them.

> purchase requirement, however, and you will be charged a special fee for the
> "non standard" service.

That's one thing I find rather annoying about Dell server pricing - AFAIK
they charged the same to install W2K or RH on a box, despite the
considerably lower cost of a retail box of RH and the fact that the work for
Dell is the same in either case i.e. blast an image onto a disk.

> If you want though you can have Dell put Broin OS on
> a few thousand systems, just send in an image and a large Euro note...


Hmm - the biggest Euro note in my pocket is 200 - I take it I'm shy a few
zeroes :-) ?



Niall