Acer to release Ubuntu Linux laptops

[Tejas Dinkar]

I actually wrote this mail a while back, but sent it from the wrong
email address, and it got rejected.

On Thu, August 2, 2007 8:07 am, Rahul Sundaram said:
> Unlikely. OEM's usually need a commercially supported product with less
> moving parts and longer lifecycle which is why Dell ships RHEL, SLES and
> Ubuntu (LTS) and not Fedora or even regular Ubuntu versions. Other
> vendors resell these under various names too.  System76 for example. I
> haven't checked what Acer is doing here but I also came across this

I pity the fool who mentions acer around me.

Acer Laptops (at least the Travelmates in india) comes with a distro
called `Linpus` which is configured to be a piece of crap.

It has root only login, into text only terminal. And that too with no
password

is X installed? NO
do wifi, networking card work? NO
Does ACPI work? Ha Ha Ha ROTFLMFAO

As of Fedora 5, everything on the laptop works more or less (Battery
Support for the laptop works as of FC5)

I could never understand why they don't just ship laptops with some decent
working distro, instead of their ridiculous thing.

The answer came to me while i pulled this same rant in a LUG meet.
Someone speculated that they are just selling the laptop `without the 
windows tax on it`. They don't really expect people to use the laptop 
with linux on it. They expect people to pirate windows and install it.

It's just that they can advertise the laptop as `comes installed with
Linux` (machines with no OS installed are sometimes seen as pro-piracy)

I just can't help but wonder if this bit with Ubuntu is a similar play.
-- 
Tejas Dinkar
http://gja.in