Know some of you saw this in last week’s post, but I wanted to be clear that Dell does have plans to offer Linux to more consumers in additional locations outside the United States. More details to come later this summer. We will also offer Ubuntu to small business customers in the future. As soon as we have more details to share, I’ll blog about both topics here.
Starting next week, we’re going to tweak how we blog about Linux on Direct2Dell. Many who follow our Linux developments are already familiar with the Linux category on the blog and already have RSS subscriptions to it. After talking to some of the key team members on the Linux engineering team, it seems like there is an opportunity to provide more technical updates for folks who are interested.
Here’s how we’re going to do it: we’ll have an expanded group of Linux engineers provide these updates that may be as short as a sentence or two that would be of interest to certain customers. These short updates may be related to a specific open source project, or may pertain to a specific Linux distribution, for instance. But instead of appearing on the main Direct2Dell home page where all other posts show up, these incremental updates will only show up in the Linux category. Now Linux-related posts that may be of interest to a broader set of customers (like this one) will still appear on the home page.
Bottom line: if you’re a customer who uses Red Hat or Suse-based PowerEdge servers at work and Ubuntu on an Inspiron notebook at home, or if you’re just passionate about Linux and open source initiatives, go ahead and subscribe to the Linux category. You can do that by plugging in this URL to your favorite RSS reader. That way, you’ll be sure to see all Linux-related posts coming from the Dell team. What this all means is that you’ll be hearing from a few different Linux engineering folks on a pretty regular basis: Matt Domsch, John Hull and Michael E. Brown will be the main contributors to the expanded Linux content on Direct2Dell.
This recent post from Tom Dryer caught my eye a couple of days ago, and thought I’d comment on it here. If the rumors about HP offering Ubuntu are true, we’re glad to see other vendors join us in support of Ubuntu and open source. We welcome HP and other system vendors that want to join in this initiative.
And speaking of things that caught my eye, you’d be surprised how our recent Linux offerings are affecting folks at Dell. Just watch this video.