LinuxWorld San Francisco 2007 Wrap-Up

Well, LinuxWorld is over for another year.  It was a busy week, with lots of announcements, great press coverage of our CTO's keynote, and a narrow defeat of your heroes in the Golden Penguin Bowl.

First off, we've got videos—lots of videos. We'll see if my colleagues were right when they said I have a face made for radio. To test that theory, I had the chance to shoot some vlogs from the LinuxWorld show floor.  In these interviews, you get to see the Dell booth, and meet the people behind Dell's activities, as well as meet key business partners from Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, and more. I couldn't embed all the videos in the post, but I've supplied download links for all in various formats just below the pictures.

We start with an introduction to the show by yours truly, and an interview with Tui Leauanae, Dell's Linux product marketing manager and show coordinator.

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We made two Desktop Linux announcements at the show.  First, based on your feedback on Direct2Dell and IdeaStorm, Dell is now selling select Desktop and Notebook systems with Ubuntu Linux factory-installed in the UK, France, and Germany.  I talked with Daniel Judd, desktop/notebook product marketing manager at Dell and Mark Murphy, alliance partner manager at Canonical about this new development.  Second, Dell has been working with Novell/SuSE to factory install SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on our corporate desktop and notebook systems in China.  I talked with Jeff Biehle, a Novell alliance partner manager, about what this means for our customers in China, and, due to the increased testing and certification, the implications for customers worldwide.

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Peter Lillian, Dell's product marketing manager for High Performance Compute Clusters, talked with me about Dell's entries on the Top 500 Supercomputer list, and the role of Linux in  the HPCC market.

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Mike Evans, VP of Corporate Development at Red Hat, discussed our announcement that Dell will offer several JBoss solution suites, for users running either Windows or Linux.

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Fellow Fedora Project Board member Karsten Wade, and Fedora engineer Jack Aboutboul were manning the Fedora booth, and took time to tell me about the Fedora Translations effort, and the Creative Commons Live Content CD they were giving away, built entirely with Open Source tools included in Fedora 7.

 

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It was good to see lots of coverage of Dr. Kevin Kettler's keynote on Virtualization, with articles by Ars Technica, IDG, Information Week, The Inquirer, Tech Republic, ZDNet, and many more.  Lots of attention around the idea of ubiquitous embedded virtualization capabilities to drive up adoption of the technologies and get the benefits into the hands of end users more quickly. Video should be posted on the Linuxworld.com shortly. I'll update this post with a link to Kevin's keynote when it's available and we welcome your input on this hot topic as we look to keep the conversation going and deliver solutions that simplify the way you deploy virtualization in your environments.

Dell engineers presented two conference sessions at LinuxWorld, and two at the new Next Generation Data Center conference in the same space.  These link to the slides:

Comments  Comment RSS Feed

mim said:

PS: Somehow I was unable to post under the XPS comments so i've put this here instead.

After being given the run around by Dell Australia who now says my XPS m1330 order will deliver ALMOST THREE MONTHS after my original delivery date, (order date: 5th of July, EST is now 25 SEPTEMBER!) I decided that Dell could K.M.A and refund my money.

I've been a long time customer of Dell but obviously they don't care about what the customer wants. I tried to ask for an extended warranty to make it worth my while hanging around like a goose but that got rejected by the 'management' and offered me a $69 printer instead  -_- 

Good Luck Dell. This is an embarassment and you've failed to live up to ANY expectations whatsoever.  

noname said:

I come from belgium and I want to know why I don't have my inspiron 1520 yet. It's the blog of dell, so explain me what happened.. please, I want to know before cancellation... My inspiron is a black 1520, t7300, 8600 m gt, 6 cells battery, 2 GB ram and 160 Sata 5400rpm.

 

Bill said:

It's very exciting to see DELL's commitment to Linux, especially on the desktop. You should advertise the Linux computers more prominently on your website, especially the fact that they are ~$50 cheaper than their Windows counterparts. In fact, have Linux and Windows both listed as options on the same computer.

 BTW: Why did you remove the Ubuntu-based XPS 410 N
 from your website? The link now says "We need you to adjust your order" when I try to buy the XPS 410 N.

Randy Ignatz said:
Just wanted to post a follow up to earlier. Dell took care of me and everything was awesome. Thanks.
Angry Constumer (Potential ASUS) said:

I don't know why Dell won't give us more than just $50 credits for a 2K laptop. Oh well, I'll just phone forever, I need at lesat $200.

Daniel said:
It is time for a

What's Going On # 2?

My God... Dell's delay is killing me! 

 

AlexM said:

I have to agree with mim. The M1330 is STILL not shipping here and after MASSIVE delays we are starting to get really really angry. I was duped into buying the M1330 after the Dell Sales Rep and her supervisor both swore that it would ship within two weeks. It's now scheduled for the 12th September, but given that it has slipped five times so far I am not holding my breath.

I, like many others, have been loyal to Dell for many years having bought many machines from them, but this will be the last. I'm afraid you have just lost the plot when it comes to service

Simply disgusting service from Dell in Australia, but hey, as long as the US and Euro customers get there deliveries that's fine I guess.
 

Tama Faali'i said:
I would like to say that it's awewome working with the people at Dell. I've never had problems with them or their products.
I am considering a dell product and this was informative.
Chikitulfo said:

It's great to hear about computers with ubuntu preinstalled in europe,

I only complain for one thing. I am Spanish and I still have to wait for my ubuntu dell

Please take them here too as soon as possible!
 

Jumrad said:
I know that your terms is do not allowed a customer from abroad for purchase this product. And i think it's decides wrong, because everyone it is want to bought online in Dell Home Inc. There for, i want did you know that i am interest for own the product wish my ordered and did you delivered into my address in Indonesia. Can you help me for on us
Nathan said:
I have been running Linux on Dells since 1999. I'm really happy to see Dell giving back to Linux users. I've been a Dell customer for years, but I did buy a Lenovo due to Dell's summer-o-delays.

While Dell & Linux is not new, Dell and DESKTOP Linux is new with Ubuntu. I know that this is a new challenge for the company, and you can see that in the computers that they are shipping.

From what I have read, they are shipping the computers without setting them up for the hardware much. The big obvious problem is that they are shipping them at 1024x768 and not the native resolution of 1280x800.

Changing the resolution will only take an experienced user a few seconds, but the non-experienced user could not know why everything was fuzzy on the screen and blame Linux for the fuzz.

Dell's Media Direct pre-boot software is more needed by Linux users because their is no legal way to play CSS'ed DVDs in Linux. If media direct is using part of windows (as I would guess it is), this could be a problem.

Media Direct & Ubuntu Latitude machines (just the 630 would be fine), would help business Linux adoption.

Summary:
1. We Linux people love Dells, and are happy to see Ubuntu on desktop/laptops

2. Ubuntu needs better configuration at the Dell factory

3. Dell Media Direct is needed by business Linux users (who can't put illegal software on their computers to play DVDs).

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