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Lenovo to Ship Linux on Select Notebooks

By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews

August 6, 2007, 10:45 AM

Following in the footsteps of Dell, Lenovo said Monday that it plans to give both consumers and businesses the option to have Linux installed as the default operating system over Windows on select models. The company announced a partnership with Novell that puts SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on laptop models aimed at commercial customers, although they would also be available to individual customers as well.

Support for the OS would come from Lenovo itself, with Novell providing the maintenance updates directly to customers. "We have seen more customers utilizing and requesting open source notebook solutions in education, government and the enterprise since our ThinkPad T60p Linux announcement, and today's announcement expands upon our efforts by offering customers more Linux options," Lenovo notebook business chief Sam Dusi said.

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By Bambi1

posted Aug 8, 2007 - 8:29 AM

It's great to have an Enterprise solution but it would also be wise to have a home user option as well, like Ubuntu.

Score: 0

By Bambi1

edited Aug 8, 2007 - 8:22 AM

That's great news! Any OEM would find it worthwhile to have Linux options.

I am sure they would all love to have a Mac option as well. ;)

Score: 0

By xyzcb1

posted Aug 6, 2007 - 12:20 PM

I honestly donno why they offer this other than have a high profit margin. I don't see Linux laptop/pc is cheaper than Windows laptop/pc. And if someone want to install Linux, they would rather install and customize it themselves.

Score: 0

By Tenoq

posted Aug 7, 2007 - 1:38 AM

Manufacturer support. It's that simple. And I'd also be surprised if the laptops aren't cheaper with the Linux version. It might not be $200, but they should knock a bit off the price.

Score: 0

By kingttx

posted Aug 6, 2007 - 12:09 PM

It is interesting to note their distro choice. I tend to think this may hurt them a little with adoption with the more conservative FOSS users.

Score: 0

By zridling

posted Aug 6, 2007 - 5:27 PM

Good point. I'd love to know their reasoning behind that choice. I do think, however, that distros like Red Hat's Global Desktop and SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) could become commonplace on these commercial systems because they come with support. A lot of newbies would gladly pay $50 to break into the GNU/Linux side and not be thrown in at the deep end.*
_________________
*It's not like GNU/Linux isn't the most widely community supported OS in history. Google and forum searches take as much as five minutes sometimes, glory be.

Score: 0

By Linville79

edited Aug 6, 2007 - 12:24 PM

I'd have to agree that if they are trying to attract more FOSS community members, then using Novell's OS is the wrong choice. What they really should have done is adopted an OS that has committed itself to using only FOSS software, such as Ubuntu or Red Hat/Fedora.

Score: 0

By Frostek

posted Aug 6, 2007 - 3:25 PM

True, but that might indicate that's not their target market.

Score: 0

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