[lug] DELL computers with Linux

[John Karns]

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Gordon Golding wrote:

>>> want to get a new computer. I don't care to touch Dell, as one must 
>>> buy Microsoft OS with them.  <dino at boulder.net >.

>
> DELL sells computers with RedHat Linux Enterprise.  Look under 
> "medium-size business" on their website.
>
> Smaller ones come with Enterprise Workstation - WS (I've got a room full 
> of them in boxes.  Wiping Enterprise and installing Redhat 8...)

Recently there was a story on Groklaw about trying to order a Dell w/ 
Linux preinstalled.  For more more info see:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040918105850387

One of the comments to the article follows:

==============================================================

I was on a plane recently, sitting next to a guy who claimed to be a Dell 
senior sales VP. I mentioned I had bypassed Dell for a purchase a week or 
so before, because they don't support Linux. He acted surprised, and said 
I should visit their web site. I told him I had visited the site (and saw 
what PJ reported here); despite a claim to support Linux, it is almost 
impossible to buy a Dell machine with Linux.

He continued to act surprised. I told him to visit his own website from a 
customer POV and he'd see what I meant.

Don't trust Dell: they make nice machines, but they are on their knees for 
Gates. I put Dell in the same category as HP (broken ACPI (nonstandard), 
that they only tell Microsoft how to get around). 2+ years after Presario 
release, they have still not fixed it.

==============================================================

>From my own experience, re ACPI implementation on a Dell, I was getting a 
boot time error msg on my Inspiron 8100:

"Dell Inspiron with broken BIOS detected. Refusing to enable the local 
APIC."

That's with a 2.4 kernel.  I had resigned myself to the fact that there 
was a flaw in the BIOS, while wondering why they had never bothered to fix 
such a problem in all of the BIOS revisions that Dell has issued for the 
machine.

I've noticed that the error is absent when I boot from a recent 2.6 
kernel, so figured that there was something relevant and long standing in 
Linux ACPI support that had been fixed in 2.6 kernels.  But from what was 
stated above, it seems that the kernel developers may have just discovered 
how to deal with Dell's (intentionally quirky) implementation of the 
standard.


-- 
John Karns