I'm foolish. I trusted Dell would be smart enough to make sure they entered the Linux market with products that could grow a base of loyal customers.  Well, evidently I was wrong.

 

I just bought a Dell Ubuntu Inspiron 530 Desktop thinking Dell would have pre-tested it in multiple Linux environments - certainly with the current version of Ubuntu, 8.04, even though they sold it with the outdated Ubuntu 7.11 version.

 

Obviously they did not do any of said testing. This computer is assuredly not Linux-happy. It balks with the  current 'buntu's, Mint Elyssa,  Mandriva 2008.1, PCLinuxOS 2007, Mepis, and OpenSuse 11.  I didn't try Fedora because it's over my head.  I found very few - like Sidux - that run ok.

 

I finally got the 'buntu's and Mint running with an addition to the boot instructions I read about. The Intel video is not happy by default either. Linux forums are full of unhappy Dell customers trying to get Dell computers to work.

 

I'm very very disappointed in my first (and likely last) Dell computer purchase.  I believe they misrepresented it.

 

Note to Dell: Linux people are notorious distro-hoppers. If you sell Linux, make sure your product works with most of the current big distros if you want people to return for more. Because your competitors' desktop computers work far better than yours with Linux as a general rule (I don't know about laptops so I can't comment)