[nzlug] Dell and Linux

[Simon Bridge]

On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 13:38 +1200, Michael Adams wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:35:04 +1200
> Simon Bridge wrote:
> 
> > Good greif - I figured there'd be a landslide to OSS after all the
> > stuff about vista. But 70% !!! Of course, Dell has courted linux
> > before and nothing came of it but their servers.
> > 
> 
> Probably early adopters were polled, or online sales. Either way it will
> probably contain a fair overdose of net savvy users in the 70%.
> 
Oh absolutely... this is telling us that a sizeable majority of
net-savvy people who have heard about the survey were prepared to plumb
for linux in some form.

I still think 70% is bigger than anyone would have guessed. And they
must realise that the data is only for net savvy customers with a
sizeable bias towards linux advocates... it still tells them there is a
decent market out there. Now... how to tap it...

> I wonder if they would also go as far as offering dual boot on a 20Gb
> bigger HDD for free. THAT might work. "I think my Windows Vista has a
> virus so i am writing this email from Linux, did you know its got a free
> Office thingy included." What we would need to do is to make sure they
> get both the linux and windows sides configured at purchase. Bob around
> the corner can't do it for them.
> 
Yeah - who's going to do the configuring and what will they include.
They want "community support" for the linux stuff. Will they include all
that suspicious multimedia stuff?

Selling dual boots as an option is a cute idea - however, I suspect that
the linux machines will be made out of hardware that won't run vista.