[Sussex] Dell going with Ubuntu

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Steve 'Dobbo' Dobson wrote:
> Morning all
>
> On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 03:10:16PM -0600, linux at oneandoneis2.org wrote:
>   
>>
>> I imagine the man-hours it takes to do all that, plus the cost of  
>> Windows itself, do add up.. And Mark Shuttleworth's probably canny  
>> enough to have offered some kind of inducements for Dell to keep the  
>> price down ;o)
>>     
>
> I doubt that the man hours per sale is that much.  I'm sure Dell has a
> small army of backroom boys making sure that the disk image for a 
> systems has all the appropriate drivers installed.
>   
Oh, those are *VERY* expensive man-hours. They take lab space, 
pre-release hardware, documentation, vendor relationships to get 
pre-release drivers, etc., etc., etc. I've done this kind of work, and 
those backroom boys pull down a lot of money and resources to integrate 
the tools into installer disks as well.

Few things are as frustrating for these backroom boys as when a vendor 
upgrades or alters chipsets without telling anyone: it's bitten me again 
and again, in both the proprietary OS and open source world. It's 
particularly deadly when the open source distribution is tied to a very 
"stable" distribution that's so stable it's moribund. (wifi on netbsd, 
anyone?)
> Sure doing that for one system is a lot of work as you point out, but
> if you were going to be building lots of identical systems you'd install
> and test on one and then image the disk.  Dell sale thousands.
>   
Yeah, but the variations in configurations are nasty to test for. 
Motherboard upgrades, BIOS updates, hard drive, new displays, etc. all 
cost a lot of money and time to check. It's one reason Dell gets 
business: they don't just slap together whatever's in the latest parts 
catalog, and swear it will all work, honest they actually do some 
testing before selling laptops and desktops and business systems.

I've worked for a vendor whose sales people promised the latest features 
out of Wired magazine and expected us to make it work for hardware 
scheduled to ship in one week. It's.... hard to do.

> The problem I see for Dell (and any other PC maker) is the lag between
> hardware release and the drivers getting written and then packaged in
> the various distros (or for Dell Ubuntu).
>
> Of course Dell, being such a big player, can just demand of it's h/w
> suppliers that Linux/Ubuntu support is there.  This should mean that
> either the h/w manufactures employ Linux kernel developers or early
> access to the h/w is given to the appropriate teams.
>
> So on the whole this is a good think.
>   
And they can integrate patches for their particular component sets into 
their distribution: I highly approve of this.