Before we announce the availability of Ubuntu 7.04 on select Dell client systems, I’d like to give an overview of what customers can expect from our initial Ubuntu offering.
Availabile Software and Hardware
- The default software from the Ubuntu media will be installed on the system, including kernel and applications.
- The peripheral options offered with Ubuntu will be a subset of what is offered with other operating systems. We’re offering the hardware options on each system that have the most mature and stable Linux driver support. These hardware options have been thoroughly tested by the Linux team here at Dell.
- We configure/install open source drivers for hardware, when possible.
- We use partial open-source or closed source (“restricted” in Ubuntu terms) drivers where there is no equivalent open-source driver. This includes Intel wireless cards and Conexant modems.
- We will have a wiki page on our linux.dell.com website that gives technical details of the supported systems, information on the device drivers used for system peripherals, details of our Ubuntu factory-installation, and information on the problems we found during our testing, with their fixes/workarounds.
- We recommend Linux users buy Dell printers that have PostScript engines in them. The previous hyperlink lists those printers. You can also check in the Tech Specs tab for each printer on Dell.com show if it has PostScript or not.
Software and Hardware Not Offered
- For hardware options not offered with this release, we are working with the vendors of those devices to improve the maturity and stability of their associated Linux drivers. While this may not happen overnight, we do expect to have a broader range of hardware support with Linux over time.
- At this time, we are not including any support for proprietary audio or video codecs that are not already distributed with Ubuntu 7.04. These include MPEG 1/2/3/4, WMA, WMV, DVD, Quicktime, etc. We are evaluating options for providing this support in the future.