[ILUG] Dell's pathetic Linux device support

[raoul duke]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 10:26:36AM -0800, Justin Mason wrote:
> 
> Timothy Murphy writes:
> >On Thursday 22 January 2004 17:20, Aidan Delaney wrote:
> >
> >> HP, IBM and several other vendors have
> >> made noises about providing proper GNU/Linux support on their desktop
> >> machines.  Can we get Dell to do the same?
> >
> >In my experience drivers from  manufacturers are usually more trouble
> >than they are worth -
> >often they only work with ancient kernels,
> >and you never know if they will still work if you ugrade your system.
> >
> >I wouldn't buy a system from Dell, or anyone else,
> >unless I knew that someone was successfully running Linux on it.
> 
> Yep.  Dell have been bad in the past (in my experience) with producing
> machines with reliable Linux support.   I would suggest, unless you really
> trust the hardware vendor to buy into Linux -- as IBM have ;) -- give it a
> miss.
> 
> My suggestion is, if you're buying a machine, do a google for the
> components and linux, to see if someone else is running on it reliably.
> (Yes, this is ridiculous, but while manufacturers buy cheap, undocumented
> components that only work on Windows, you've got to do it.)
> 

is it not possible to get a linux preinstalled pc in
europe yet? something like http://koobox.com? will ibm really bring out
desktops with the option of either windows or linux preinstalled? maybe
they're just  moving their desktops in their offices to linux but not
actually selling their desktops with linux. it's quite unclear what ibm's
long term intentions are.

you could always build your own, it'd cost way less and you'd be sure that
your pc is 100% linux compatible or another thing you could do is burn up a
knoppix or mandrake move or <insert the name of another linux livecd here>
and go into some shops and try it out on some pcs there although i don't
know if the shop assistants would let you.

another thing you could do is get an apple 8)