Direct2Dell : Linux

New Vostro Systems for Emerging Economies: Ubuntu in More Countries

Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Today we're rolling out two new laptops and desktops that are designed to meet the specific needs of small businesses, government and educational facilities operating on a limited budget in the worlds top emerging markets. Take a look at either Steve Felice's post or Kara Krautter's post on the Small Business blog for a bit more context on that front.

Note: Click on any of the images in these post to see larger versions of them. You can also see these photos and more by viewing this photo set at the main Dell Flickr page.

One thing of interest to a lot of our readers is that we will offer Ubuntu Linux as an option on all four of these machines worldwide. Regular readers of Direct2Dell know that we already support Ubuntu on select systems several countries.

These new Vostro systems will be introduced in more than 20 countries over the coming months—including Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. They will be available primarily through authorized channel partners worldwide and also directly from Dell. Pricing for the products will vary by configuration, region and country. Additional Vostro products designed for emerging markets and high-growth economies will be introduced in the coming months.

Update: I apologize to Direct2Dell readers. I made some mistakes in some of the following tech details. In those cases below. I used strikethroughs with updated text to correct them. Again, my apologies for the errors.

Today, we're offering two pre-configured laptops--the Vostro A840 and A860, and two pre-configured desktops—the Vostro A100 and A180. Both the affordable notebooks feature a sturdy compact design. The A840 weighs in at 5 lbs 4.48 lbs while the A80 weighs just about 5.7 lbs 5.42 lbs.

Both offer features like The A860 features an HD screen with an anti-glare coating and Intel Celeron or Core 2 Duo processors. Both offer all kind of connectivity features including wireless, Ethernet and modem capability. Bluetooth is an option as well. The 15.6" Vostro A860 notebook will eventually be available globally, including the United States.

On the desktop side, both the Vostro A100 and the A180 are meant to tackle everyday business needs. The entry-level Vostro A100 comes standard with Intel's Atom processor. The A180 supports Celeron and Core 2 Duo Pentium dua-core processors. Like the laptops, both of these systems tha Vostro A180 can be ordered with Ubuntu or Windows Vista Home Basic as well. The A100 will be offered with Ubuntu and supports up to 80GB hard drives and a 16x DVD drive. Both systems The A180 supports up to 160GB hard drives, and either DVD or DVD+/-RW optical drives.

If you're interested to learn more about these products, take a look at this vlog with Kirk Schell from Dell Commercial Products Team. Besides giving an overview of these systems, he provides some insight into why products like these play an important role in reaching these rapidly-expanding economies.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Dell XPS 1530n and Studio 15n Now Available with Ubuntu 8.04

Daniel Judd, Product Group Strategist — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:15:00 GMT

Today is the day. For customers in the United States who interested in compelling notebooks with 15.4” Hi-def widescreen displays the Dell XPS M1530n and Studio 15n notebooks are now available with Ubuntu 8.04 factory installed. US customers can check out these systems and more at www.dell.com/ubuntu (or click on the Ubuntu image below).

Thanks again to the Linux community for the continued support (and purchase) of Dell systems with Linux pre-installed. Your interest and direct feedback enables better solutions on a broader array of platforms. Hope to see you at LinuxWorld!

Dell at LinuxWorld this Week

John Hull, Manager of Linux OS Engineering — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:38:00 GMT

As many of you know, the 2008 LinuxWorld Conference and Expo is taking place this week in San Franciscso. Several of us at Dell will be attending to take part in the "Desktop Linux" track. I'll be part of a panel discussion titled "OEM Desktop Panel Discussion - We’re shipping Linux on PCs: Now What?" on Wednesday morning at 11:30, while Daniel Judd and Cole Crawford are hosting a session titled "The Client Linux Desktop: A Dell Case Study", on Thursday morning at 10:15. If you're attending the conference, please stop by and chat with us; we'd love to meet you and get your feedback.

Linux Symposium 2008 follow-up

Matt Domsch, Linux Technology Strategist — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:53:00 GMT

I'm back, having made the annual pilgramage to Ottawa for this year's Linux Symposium. I went to present about Fedora's MirrorManager application I've been writing over the past 18 months, to hear about new developments across Linux, and of course, the popular hallway track. The conference organizers did a great job this year adding the late-night speakers cruise on the river. The Whiskey BOF was truly enjoyable if not prophetic, held at a nearby government bomb shelter, built over 3 years to withstand a 5 metaton bomb blast, but was rendered obsolete a year later with the advent of a 50 metaton bomb. Sometimes I feel like I'm on that technology trajectory with the fast pace of development around me!

Fedora had a big presence this year, with at least 10 presentations, tutorials, or Birds of a Feather sessions. My favorite was Chris Tyler's talk on the college course he developed which involves college seniors in Open Source and Free Software projects. A distinct change from the "waterfall" method I was taught in college (which even then felt pretty dated and bureaucratic), students learn how to interact with a community, find a relevant and achievable way to contribute to their project in one semester, and establish themselves as community members and participants.

I shot video of 5 of the sessions. Soon to hit Fedora TV's RSS feed are:

Getting the Bits Out: Fedora's MirrorManager (me)
Secondary Arches, enabling Fedora to run everywhere (Dennis Gilmore)
A Model for Sustainable Student Involvement in Community Open Source (Chris Tyler)
Creating your own (Fedora) Distribution (Jesse Keating)
RHEL and Fedora kickstart file generation on the fly (Scott Moser)

I look forward to the Firefox 3.1 release that includes native OGG video support so these are easily watchable everywhere and without encumberance.

Mark Shuttleworth gave an interesting keynote speech, advocating for the coordination and synchronization of the release schedules of more parts of the Linux ecosystem. I do believe there is benefit in having a regular cadence to releases (such as the regular 6 month schedule for consumer / desktop distributions). I think some alignment of Enterprise-class distributions could benefit the larger ecosystem as well, at a much slower cadence (~2-3 years). Third party applications, those not included with the Linux distributions themselves, often look to leverage their Linux development investments so as to be useful on several distributions. The Linux Standard Base has long advocated another method to provide this stability (feature-based instead of time-based), but being asynchronous to any distribution's release schedule, has not achieved all it has hoped. At the same time, it would be difficult for computer manufacturers, such as Dell, to complete development, testing, and release readiness for multiple Enterprise-class Linux operating systems simultaneously. I will be interested to participate in the ongoing conversation about Mark's proposal.

Next year we'll all be exploring Montreal, I look forward to seeing you there.

Ubuntu 8.04 Offering—Technical Details

John Hull, Manager of Linux OS Engineering — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I'd like to follow up our Ubuntu 8.04 post with a quick update on the technical details for what we have added with this release. We have continued to build and improve upon on what we did for our Ubuntu 7.10 offering, and here are some of the highlights:

We have added Fluendo GStreamer codecs for mp3, wma, and wmv playback. This will allow you to play media of those types in your favorite media player on the system. These codecs are in addition to the LinDVD DVD player application that we're continuing to offer as a standard part of every Ubuntu 8.04 system.
Biometric fingerprint readers are now supported on the XPS laptops. We have all of the necessary software installed and ready to use; you just have to easily configure the software to recognize your fingerprint.
ATI Graphics options are available on the Inspiron 530n, and will also be available on the Studio 15n. We're using the close-source fglrx driver to give full OpenGL support
HDMI audio output is now supported with NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards, so you'll now be able to output both audio and video to your home A/V equipment. As many of you know for HDMI, the audio output is directed out what is essentially an HDMI video port, so the graphics drivers need to know how to interact with the audio controller. We worked with both NVIDIA and ATI to get their graphics drivers to work with the HDMI ports on our systems, and we find HDMI to work well with both. Unfortunately, HDMI audio does not yet work with Intel graphics cards.

I'll add more in a few weeks once we start selling The XPS 1530n and Studio 15n with Ubuntu 8.04.

Select Systems Now Available with Ubuntu 8.04

Daniel Judd, Product Group Strategist — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

After months of testing and development we are ready to release Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on select Dell consumer systems. For consumers in the United States, France, Germany, Spain, Canada, United Kingdom and many Latin American countries (like Mexico and Colombia) Ubuntu 8.04 will be offered on the XPS M1330N and Inspiron 1525N notebooks and the Inspiron 530N Click on any of the country links above or go to www.dell.com/ubuntu to place your order. :)

In early August, we will also add the XPS M1530n and Studio 15n to the line-up. This is just in time for LinuxWorld where we will participate in a number of the conference sessions. That will be your chance to hear directly about what’s been accomplished over the last year and where we see it going in 2009.

In her post, Anne Camden mentions some of the new features the Ubuntu 8.04 brings. Beyond that, we took steps to make our Linux images more accessible to a global audience by including the ability to select your language during the first boot process. While this does not mean we’re shipping in every country (yet) it’s a step in the right direction. Stay tuned for a technical details post from John Hull will provide a good overview of the work we did on the new release. Similar post from him on Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 releases have proved to be pretty popular with the Linux community.

DKMS maintainership passing to Mario Limonciello

Matt Domsch, Linux Technology Strategist — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:50:00 GMT

It is with great pleasure, and a sigh of relief, that I am announcing that Mario Limonciello has agreed to become the new maintainer for DKMS.

Mario is well known in the Ubuntu community, both as an active contributor to the Mythbuntu project, and as a "Master of the Universe" (MOTU). He has greatly improved DKMS's support for Debian/Ubuntu systems, and in DKMSifying the lirc and fglrc-installer packages, has made DKMS use widespread in Ubuntu.

Mario started working for Dell in early 2008 and has been instrumental in developing Ubuntu as sold on Dell desktop and notebook systems.

Please welcome Mario as the new maintainer of DKMS.

Dell at Red Hat Summit and FUDCon

Matt Domsch, Linux Technology Strategist — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:35:00 GMT

This week, Dell will be out "in force" at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. If you're attending the show, be sure to stop by the Dell booth in the expo area, where we'll have one of our new PowerEdge M1000e modular blade enclosures on hand, as well as a Precision M6300 mobile workstation (coincidentally sold with Red Hat Enterprise Linux installed). We'll be giving away green swag bags, so come take a look at what we've got.

Thursday will be a busy day. During lunch, we will be offering a "Lunch-n-Learn" session, where you can talk to Dell engineers like myself, and ask us anything you like about Dell & Linux. At 4pm, Robert Hentosh and Peter Lillian present Get IT Faster, Run IT Better, Grow IT Smarter, focusing on Dell's High Performance Compute Cluster and High Availability solutions built with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Also at 4pm, I'll be presenting Getting the Bits Out: Fedora Mirror Manager in the Open Source Software track. Of course, this would have to conflict with Fedora user and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst who is speaking in the FUDCon area at the same time. Such is my luck.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I'll be involved in the Fedora User and Developer Conference. With over 150 people lined up (and you're welcome to come even if you haven't pre-registered), it should be the largest US-based FUDCon ever. There will be a lot of work hammering out ideas and features for Fedora 10 and beyond, but it's always a good time. There may even be some last-minute campaigning by the good candidates for the Fedora Project Board (be sure to vote!). Just beware the ninjas!

I hope to see you there.

Fedora 9 released, Thank You Mirrors!

Matt Domsch, Linux Technology Strategist — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:01:00 GMT

Just a quick shout out to all of the great Fedora public mirrors worldwide. Tuesday's release of Fedora 9 was the smoothest yet from a Fedora Infrastructure POV - no switch meltdowns, no datacenters knocked offline, and few gripes about slow downloads from the forums I've read.

In the first two days, over 107,000 users downloaded CD or DVD images from our mirror system, more than double that of the 48,000 BitTorrent downloaders. Our mirrors served those bits at a combined 67 Gigabits/sec. Of those who downloaded Fedora 9, more than 44,000 have already installed in these two days, evidenced by their systems checking for updates. So we know it's being put to good use.

Thanks to all our great volunteer mirror admins, and their sponsoring Universities and companies, for making this release a success. Your contribution to Fedora, and Free and Open Source Software, is appreciated by users around the globe.

If you are interested in hosting a public or private Fedora mirror, please see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring for how to get started.

Edit: Jef reminded me that we have great maps you'll want to see.

First, all our public mirrors worldwide. If you don't see one near you, please help us add one!

Next, Fedora 9 adoption this week:

MirrorManager at Red Hat Summit

Matt Domsch, Linux Technology Strategist — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:03:00 GMT

I'll be presenting Fedora's MirrorManager project at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. The Summit runs June 18-20, my presentation is on Thursday afternoon at 4pm. If you're attending FUDCon (the Fedora User and Developer Conference) that's running parallel to the Summit, you'll be able to get in for free to the Open Source track presentations in the Summit, including mine. Dell is sponsoring the Summit, so you'll hear more from us here on the blog as it approaches.