Dell launched an IdeaStorm website to find out what people wanted. Thousands said “pre-installed Linux”, and Dell listened. On May 1, it announced “a partnership with Canonical to offer Ubuntu on select consumer desktop and notebook products”.
Dell now says it will offer Ubuntu 7.04, known as Feisty Fawn, pre-installed on selected systems in the United States, but customers in other countries will have to wait to hear if they can get it too. Dell United Kingdom says it is “still working out details of its global programme and will share details when it has definitive plans”.
Ubuntu is a version of Debian Linux that is backed by South African multimillionaire and space tourist Mark Shuttleworth. His company, Canonical, owns all the Ubuntu trademarks (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu) and offers paid-for support for the free operating system.
Although not large enough to offer worldwide support, it also runs a Canonical Marketplace on the web, where users can look for commercial suppliers.
Dell US says it will offer PC buyers the option to buy support from Canonical when they order their systems.
The choice of Ubuntu is not a surprise. When Dell asked which of the many versions of Linux it should offer, 80% suggested Ubuntu.
Also, according to Desktoplinux.com, company founder Michael Dell has been running Ubuntu 7.04 on a Dell Precision M90, one of his five home PCs.
Of course, Dell already has a substantial Linux-based business, shipping both the Red Hat and Novell SuSE versions on its PowerEdge servers.
It has been selling Red Hat since 1999 and, in a failed experiment, also offered Linux on desktops and notebooks from 1999 to 2001.
However, making a profit on single-user PCs running Linux could still be a very tough proposition. It requires vastly more support for drivers for all sorts of graphics cards, printers and other peripherals — and Linux users naturally prefer open-source drivers.
Supporting home users with little or no Linux experience could also turn out to be prohibitively expensive. However, Ubuntu’s focus on developing a “Linux for human beings” should help minimise the risk. Dell has been losing market share to Hewlett-Packard and Acer; whether Ubuntu can help change that remains to be seen.
The company says its Linux survey attracted more than 100 000 responses, and “more than 70% of survey respondents said they would use a Dell system with a Linux operating system for both home and office use”.
In web terms, this is a big noise, but nobody was asked for a deposit. Converting online wishes into hard cash is another matter.
Currently, Dell can ship about 40-million PCs per year, which is 1,27 PCs per second — assuming 24/7 operation with no holidays or other downtime. Even if Dell sells 100 000 PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed, that will only keep the production lines turning for 22 hours.
Dell would need to sell about 2,5-million Ubuntu machines a year to get 1% of the PC market, which would certainly make the effort worthwhile. But if that happens, Dell could find it has several thousand cut-throat rivals who can use the same open-source code against it. — Guardian Unlimited Â