I hinted at this before, but today, it's official: Dell announced that consumers in the United Kingdom, France and Germany can order an Inspiron E1505N 6400 notebook or an Inspiron 530N desktop with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed.
Update—8/8, 11:30PM CDT: Just realized I never added the links for purchasing systems. My apologies for the oversight.
Since we began offering Ubuntu in the United States back in May, it's no secret that we've received many requests from customers all over the world to offer Linux there. This represents another step in broadening that offering. Before Ubuntu, we've offered Red Hat Linux as an option for Dell Precision workstation and PowerEdge server customers.Similar to what we've done in the United States, we will configure and install open source drivers for hardware, when possible for these new products. See John Hull's Technical Details post for a more detailed explanation.
Recently, some IdeaStorm readers asked why we discontinued the Inspiron E1505N in the United States. The answer is that we transitioned to the Inspiron 1420N, which is a product that we do not offer in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
Update—8/7, 3PM CDT: In his LinuxWorld keynote, Kevin Kettler announced that Dell and Novell intend to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 factory-installed on select consumer notebooks and desktops in China. This is another step in making Linux available to more customers worldwide. We already offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as an option on PowerEdge servers. In the coming weeks, we will share more details on the which notebooks and desktops we will offer, support options, and more. Our plan is to offer SLED 10 on systems to meet the broad needs of our customers.
Beyond the Ubuntu expansion, we also have worked with Red Hat to develop a JBoss-based solution to help customers migrate from legacy applications. Because the press release summarizes this better than I can, here's more detail from it. This new offering features three solutions:
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Hi,
I've been waiting for Dell to sell machines with linux in Europe, so it's great to see it finally happen and I would like to buy a machine right away. However, I am located in Spain, but with a common market and common currency I presume it will be no problem if I order a machine from Germany or France?
Or is there any estimate of when Linux will be available in Spain? Weeks or months?
And what about the M1330?
Thanks for the good work
Anders
Will Dell offer Ubuntu in Turkey? if it is not in the plan, i request it to be included.
Regards;
Good news but I tried to get the info on dell.fr. The first one is no more available and the second one seems not to exist...
I can't wait to see a Linux or Ubuntu logo in the Operating Systems choice section.
Fantastic news! Brilliant.
Dell and Ubuntu, you deserve every success and I applaud your decision.
With this and Lenovo announcing just yesterday that they will bundle Novell SLED, the momentum is growing...
The Open Sourcerer
I want my inspiron!
That's great,
But what with Israel?
When I will be able to go to the store or, better yet, order directly a Dell home computer for a low price?
Jonathan
Congratulations people in France, Germany and UK.
But all the REAL big majority of people in the rest of European Union ?
I myself is living in Sweden and Dell often treats us a non-important market, but I know you have massive good home-pc deals with Swedish labour unions and sells a lot.
So why not start offer the same here as you do in UK ? Or else shutdown your office in Sweden for example and people here doesn't have to get fooled like I did when I purchased a XPS with the SLI promise, now it is not possible to upgrade with the delivered graphic card because the "red edition" only have the extra power cord, but that edition is NOT sold in Sweden.
It is the same thing with Linux, why not give people from Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithua, Poland, Spain, Italy, Denmark and many more the same options, forget about Swedish manuals and so on, atleast give the same option, Swedes can handle little English without any problem, so translation is not necessary.
Thats excellent news :) Congradulations on your continued expansion of linux-by-default offerings Dell. Out of curiosity - and not to whine too much ;) - but is there any chance that you will be announcing the availability of your linux-by-default in Canada? I have been holding off buying a new comp, hoping that your systems will be available in Canada before I need a new one.
Thankx for the news :)
Pat
WHAT!???
Italy. I need it in Italy! How much longer do you think I can wait?
You gotta deploy in Italy before X-mas at least.
WAKEUP!!!
PS--this fancy HTML editor does not work at all with GNOME's Epiphany browser. Since Epiphany uses Gecko to render its web pages, it really should work--this is probably a fault with the javascript code that activates the rendered.
Nice move, though I hope that people from other EU-countries will be able to order their Ubuntu-laptops from the UK, French or German website. As has already been said: it's a common market, after all. I'm from Austria, so orderin in Germany would suit me just fine.
The German website doesn't list the Inspiron 1505 yet. I hope they'll update their website soon.
Why only france UK and Germany? Aren't all the European Dell pc's build in Ireland? (mine did) Don't we have a free market in Europe?I'm planning to buy a small fileserver in september, i hope it will be a Dell, but if i still can't buy a ubuntu dell in Belgium next month, i guess i'll have to go to a locale shop where thy can sell me a windows-free pc.
anyway, good news for our neighbours i guess.
This is good news. While I wish this announcement included the Scandinavian countries, I find this exciting because some high up suite at Acer recently said there where not enough demand for preloaded Linux in the UK to give customers the option. I hope Dell and the Linux community in UK will prove them wrong.
Good luck with this brave move Dell, I hope you'll succeed so maybe we can see the offer expanded to more countries in the future.
Excellent news! I am hoping it will be a big sucess, then other PC vendors will have to sit up and take note. Everyone is getting annoyed with Microsoft and thier related issues with Vista, so this is an ideal time (Obvsiouly Dell realize this) to release a new product line with a very worthy alternative.
Nice one Dell!