[lug] DELL computers with Linux

[Zichary O`Tea]

Is there a reason why you'd favor RedHat 8 over 9 over enterprise over
Fedora?  Just curious, not trying to start a religious war, all though I
just might have accidentally. :) 

- ZT 
"Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer. But imprisonment
turns the state into a gay dungeon-master." - Rev. Jesse Jackson

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, John Karns wrote:

> 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
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