5
5

Linux for Consumers in the U.K. France, and Germany; Dell/Red Hat Solutions & More

I hinted at this before, but today, it’s official: Dell announced that consumers in the United Kingdom, France and Germany can order an Inspiron E1505N 6400 notebook or an Inspiron 530N desktop with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed.


Update—8/8, 11:30PM CDT: Just realized I never added the links for purchasing systems. My apologies for the oversight.



Since we began offering Ubuntu in the United States back in May, it’s no secret that we’ve received many requests from customers all over the world to offer Linux there. This represents another step in broadening that offering. Before Ubuntu, we’ve offered Red Hat Linux as an option for Dell Precision workstation and PowerEdge server customers.

Similar to what we’ve done in the United States, we will configure and install open source drivers for hardware, when possible for these new products. See John Hull’s Technical Details post for a more detailed explanation.


Recently, some IdeaStorm readers asked why we discontinued the Inspiron E1505N in the United States. The answer is that we transitioned to the Inspiron 1420N, which is a product that we do not offer in the United Kingdom, France and Germany. 


Update—8/7, 3PM CDT: In his LinuxWorld keynote, Kevin Kettler announced that Dell and Novell intend to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 factory-installed on select consumer notebooks and desktops in China. This is another step in making Linux available to more customers worldwide. We already offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as an option on PowerEdge servers. In the coming weeks, we will share more details on the which notebooks and desktops we will offer, support options, and more. Our plan is to offer SLED 10 on systems to meet the broad needs of our customers.


Beyond the Ubuntu expansion, we also have worked with Red Hat to develop a JBoss-based solution to help customers migrate from legacy applications.  Because the press release summarizes this better than I can, here’s more detail from it. This new offering features three solutions:



  • JBoss Enterprise Application Platform—This combines the JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and JBoss Seam with Dell hardware and the customer’s choice of Linux or Windows. The platform makes it easy to develop, deploy and manage enterprise Java applications on any operating system, while still remaining flexible and affordable. 

  • Web Application—This offering combines the Red Hat Application Stack, including the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with Dell hardware.  It is ideal for running Java or LAMP applications and provides a simple, integrated solution for customers already running an open-source operating system with legacy proprietary middleware, or for customers looking to deploy multiple open-source solutions.

  • Web Edge—Combining Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Dell hardware, this solution helps customers take advantage of the open-source operating system for activities such as Web serving with Apache.

Show Comments

No Responses Yet

Leave a Reply