Why not include a live Linux DVD with each Dell desktop/laptop?

[Richard Lloyd]

I can understand that pre-installing Linux on Dell laptops/desktops
automatically implies that Dell has to support that Linux distro (even
if you put big red warning labels everywhere on the Web site and in
the distro that it's unsupported), but why not include a free live
Linux CD or DVD with every machine sold? It would be labelled unsupported
(including when you went to install it, you'd have to agree that it
there is no direct support from Dell and you agree not to hassle them
about it :-) ).

Rumours are that the Fedora Project are working towards producing an
official live CD/DVD soon (probably in time for Fedora Core 7) and since
that's in the same family as RHEL (which Dell *do* support on servers),
then it wouldn't be a stretch for Dell Linux folks to try out the live
CD/DVD on all models they wanted to include it with and ensure the
goodies work. No idea if Fedora are planning to have an installer to
permanently put the distro on the hard disk though.

It would be nice if CentOS had a live CD/DVD (since that's a near-
identical clone of RHEL) - that would be ideal to ship with all
Dell servers (or even desktops if Dell didn't want to go the Fedora
route). In case you're wondering why I don't suggest Ubuntu's live
CD, it's because Dell's Linux team currently support RHEL and
SUSE, so moving outside that family of distros would add to their
support effort.

Anything has to be better than FreeDOS which, let's face it, is just
a workaround about Microsoft's dubious "you can't ship a desktop/laptop
without an OS because the only thing that will ever happen is that a
pirated version of Windows will end up on it" (I think that logic
is pathetic from MS - they allow transfers of Windows licences *and*
there's BSD/Linux distros out there too). Dell ship servers without
an OS, so why not desktops/laptops - there's some very fishy stuff going
on here from Dell (i.e. pressure from MS)!

Richard K. Lloyd,           E-mail: rkl at connectinternetsolutions.com
Connect Internet Solutions,    WWW: http://www.connectinternetsolutions.com/
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