What is Digg?131 Comments
- desistere, on 10/11/2007, -3/+48The computer should come with an install cd. Other than that, it seems pretty well implemented.
- Roger, on 10/11/2007, -5/+43"What I love most about Ubuntu on Dell is the lack of crappy 3rd party software that is typically shipped with their computers."
Thats no fault of Windows. Give it time. If the Ubuntu computers get popular, they'll soon have their own share of useless crap pre-installed. - rectagon, on 10/11/2007, -12/+45The simple fact that he had to configure X to get his monitor to the right resolution is a bad sign right off the bat. If linux is going to catch on for the Dell zombies it must just plain work. You can do it Ubuntu!
- welk, on 10/11/2007, -2/+34After so many people asked dell to bring out systems with linux pre-installed its good to see people backing up their request and buying the systems.
- DoctorFred, on 10/11/2007, -5/+36Bought one for my daughter.
Contrary to documentation, the wireless connection dialog didn't have an option for WPA PSK. Installed updates hoping this would fix it. After updates were installed, it wouldn't reboot. Couldn't find a bootable disk partition. Offered to let me reinstall off the recovery paritition. That also failed.
Finally, I did what I should have done to begin with: I put in the Ubuntu disk and reinstalled from scratch, blowing away all of Dell's nonsense. Installed updates. Wireless works. Everything's rosy. I don't understand the comment above about an install disk. Mine came with one. Yes, Jason, I know you said last week that I should reinstall from scratch.
Summary:
It's by far the cheapest notebook I could find that doesn't require paying the tax to the Microsoft monopoly and really it's one heck of a deal.
Kudos to Dell, but fix your installation. - schestowitz, on 10/11/2007, -10/+38Here's another review of this unit (from yesterday):
Ubuntu Linux on my Dell XPS M1210
,----[ Quote ]
| What I love most about Ubuntu on Dell is the lack of crappy
| 3rd party software that is typically shipped with their
| computers. When I bought Dell's in the past I'd basically
| strip the entire hard drive and do a fresh Windows install
| so I wouldn't have all those extra programs on my computer
| which I'd never use. To tell you the truth Ubuntu already
| comes with too much stuff for my tastes but it's really
| easy to uninstall unwanted applications in this OS.
|
| Just remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it's likely available via
| open-source.
`----
http://www.planetc1.com/cgi-bin/n/v.cgi?c=1&id=1180636878 - geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -2/+30It's /not/ that weird when you realize what's going on. A recovery partition, a diagnostic partition, and a normal boot partition, a rather enormous swap partition (very odd), then the rest is just a regular ol' ext3 root partition.
I know it could be cleaned up quite a bit (move the recovery and diagnostic partitions together, or better yet, get rid of them completely and ship a diagnostics and recovery DVD; I like the idea of a /boot partition but I've never used one myself, /home should be its own partition for re-install/upgrade purposes but as for the rest I couldn't care less; I don't even bother with swap partitions and use a small swap file instead with kernel swappiness set to 5 as most of my machines will never be put in a situation where they will need to swap with 1GB+ RAM, but it's good to preserve the functionality just-in-case), but it's not bad for a shipped OEM machine. File system and partition management have always been things nobody can completely agree on though, so who knows. Most people buying these machines will at least have the know-how to completely redo the partitioning, but that almost defeats the purpose of shipping the OS with it. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -3/+30| ,----[ Quote ]
|Restriced Drivers Manager - nVidia
|Didn't work. Sure, it said it was doing something and even showed a nice little download and install meter, then it asked me to reboot...then it killed X when it |came back up. My advice: do this manually.
`----
Show stopper right their IMHO. The review wasn't "bad" if you are a technical person, but for a new out of box computer, the average user would ***** a brick if he had a GUI failure right of the bat. - geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -4/+28"The usual rule is to have between 1-2X your amount of RAM in swap space."
That rule has been obsolete for about 2-3 years now, especially in Linux; with more and more RAM becoming available for virtually nothing, it makes less and less sense to pawn off memory to your incredibly slow-ass disk device. This is the whole idea behind Robson/Intel's Turbo Cache; replace the swap completely with something that's at least faster than a hard drive. There's still a legit use for it (applications that need XXXMBs-NGBs of RAM), which is why it's good to still have around, but the reasons for it are far and few between (and you've likely compensated if you're running one of said applications by absolutely saturating your box with RAM).
Swap was a great invention in the 90s, when memory sizes were measured in 10s of MBs. Now it's mostly a hindrance. Keeping the swap small (1:1 or less) makes more and more sense. - idonthack, on 10/11/2007, -3/+27@rectagon
He didn't have to "configure X", he just had to select his resolution from a menu. - leszek, on 10/11/2007, -0/+23more info on how to change swappiness:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#head-b179a5c0d7df0ab7d0ea1d58caaa47c7a5f8ab0e - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -6/+26How can you say "Kudos"? Sounds like they completely ***** up your new laptop with their install? If you weren't technically savvy would you still feel the same way?
- baalzebub, on 10/11/2007, -3/+21i agree, the idea of an image on the harddrive is totally stupid as harddrives can be fdisked or the very least the file can be deleted or corrupted, a CD/DVD is much more reliable for restoring & reinstalling & rescue...
- Roger, on 10/11/2007, -2/+20@ModOps
No its Dell that chooses to add crap.
And the way I see, they'll have more freedom with Ubuntu to add whatever crap they want. - marcushe, on 10/11/2007, -2/+19The Ubuntu machines are incomplete - comes as interesting to me.
Windows pamphlets and manuals? Windows recovery partition? No recovery disc?
It occured to me Dell is doing a minimal approach to a pilot product. They had their Ubuntu advertisements on the front of their website, but thats it.
If they keep selling these machines, in time they will have dedicated manuals and will restructure their install procedures - and pump up the marketing.
Otherwise, they will phase the Ubuntu machines out. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -3/+19you guys are weird, I rarely swap above 20mb running on 1gb of ram.
- Kragnerac, on 10/11/2007, -9/+24Wow, I never knew Steve Ballmer was a Digg user.
- spiffyfitz, on 10/11/2007, -3/+17A Window is a pane of glass... a Feisty Fawn is a woodland creature.
I don't see your argument. - crazybrit, on 10/11/2007, -2/+15I dugg you down, and I was going to insult you but you make such a well-supported argument, and with no grammatical errors that I can see, that I... just can't. You win.
- thesquirrelwood, on 10/11/2007, -0/+12@redxii
Asking the user to reboot is more user-friendly than "Restart X", since a new user has no clue what X is and how to restart it. Just simpler to ask for a reboot I guess. - leszek, on 10/11/2007, -1/+13don't feed the trolls
- UKsHaDoW, on 10/11/2007, -8/+20You could play quake 4?
Seriously all this stuff about linux being crap for gaming, has got to stop. Its the developers fault.
As a developer of a Game Engine for a upcoming title, I am personally making sure we have a linux port. Using SDL makes this so easily, its just a matter of a recompile.
Oh and to the people saying Linux needs a more standardized file system, Linux is even more standardized then windows. http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html
Theres so FUD its unbelievable. - unloud, on 10/11/2007, -3/+14Get medicine.
- pdiddle, on 10/11/2007, -0/+11@chandon
"I've got a gig of RAM, and I'm swapping all over the place - something like a gig of swap used. All I really have open is Firefox, OpenOffice Impress, NetBeans, and Azureus."
Well you just named 4 of the most ram intensive desktop applications, so you're bound to use up a lot. Java especially likes to use a lot of ram. - spiffyfitz, on 10/11/2007, -4/+15I don't know why you're being dugg down... Fedora never has any problem with the monitors I've owned, but Ubuntu always needs to be sudo dpkg-reconfigure xorg'd for me.
Joe User shouldn't need to touch the terminal, people are frightened to death of text-based UIs - shibz, on 10/11/2007, -13/+22Anyone that pays >$100 for a slow, bloated, insecure, unstable OS just because everyone else uses it is a complete tool.
- Gerz1219, on 10/11/2007, -5/+14Well, you'd probably need to have some idea of what you were doing before you attempted to activate the proprietary driver. Even so, I don't see any reason why Dell doesn't simply activate the driver by default. Most users will want pretty eye candy off the bat, and the people who actually get worked up into a bilious rage over the inclusion of closed source software probably aren't buying Dells anyway (and if they are, they can simply revert to the nv driver in under a minute). This fundamentalist ***** has got to stop if Linux is going to gain any market share. I'm sure the pigheaded resistance to proprietary-by-default has needlessly turned a lot of newbies off to Linux, who might otherwise have had no major problems during setup.
- joel8x, on 10/11/2007, -1/+10Buy from the small business store and they won't install the crapware.
- adrianmonk, on 10/11/2007, -0/+9@kethraal:
They don't do it to offset the cost of the Windows OEM license. They do it because they're a for-profit corporation and they want to make money.
They also do it because margins on low-end machines are razor-thin. In fact, I have been told by a Dell hardware manager that were it not for the crapware, they would lose money on low-end machines.
If I had to guess, I'd say Dell wants to stay a major player in the low-end market. It's a huge market, and even if all they do is break even on the low-end machines, being a leader in that segment of the market helps maintain their image of being a market leader in the more-profitable parts of the market.
Plus, if you buy a cheap machine from Dell and Dell breaks even on it, they've established a level of familiarity so that should you be in the market for another machine, Dell is now a known quantity to you, and you'll feel more comfortable ordering from them (assuming they behave with some basic level of competency).
The point to all of this is, if Dell could add crapware to Ubuntu machines and cut the price but maintain exactly the same profit, they probably would. It would be in their interest, because then they'd have a cheaper machine than competitors, and buyers factor price into the decision more than they factor presence/absence of crapware in.
So basically, I think Dell isn't adding crapware to Ubuntu only because it's not a good crapware platform (yet?): it's not mainstream enough (yet?), and Linux users would probably be more opposed to it. - rebopper, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9Never mind, Digg me down. I was gonna respond to Critical but it's not worth it.
- arjie, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8@critical: dude, lay off the weed.
- Phocion55, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8@CriticalImpact - "My friend was bugging me saying...."
Buried as inaccurate. You have no friends. - geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9"I've got a gig of RAM, and I'm swapping all over the place - something like a gig of swap used."
Try turning down your kernel swappiness. The big reason why you swap all over the place is because the kernel is told to: by default your kernel ships with a high setting for swapping, to keep it fast on older machines (and Linux is built to run across a _lot_ of machines). Turn down the kernel's ability to swap, and you should notice immediately that your system is more responsive (due to less going out to the disk for pages that were swapped out for little or no reason). Might help to save the life of your disk some too.
My Lifebook and my Toshiba both have 128MB swap files, and they're rarely ever touched, I've basically forgotten they're there. - pdiddle, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8I need an un-digg button. I accidentally dugg roger up :(
- UKsHaDoW, on 10/11/2007, -3/+11Linux folder hierarchy is probably more standardized then windows.
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html - Avalontor, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7It's going to have be more then 1 or 2 or 20 or 500 or 12000 or 245,319 of them. and guess what, it'll also have to be the unwashed masses not just Linux geeks. You have an uphill road to go still. having to blow Dells installation away and putting a new Ubuntu on is not for everyone.
- mym6, on 10/11/2007, -2/+9Don't forget that swap is used to suspend the system. Dell probably made it larger to allow for ram upgrades. All of your RAM must fit into swap in order to suspend the machine.
- coredump0x01, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8Just wait for Xorg 7.3 to arrive, which doesn't even require a xorg.conf file or any other type of manual configuration. Coonfiguration for most cards will be automatic and done on-the-fly (Sorry ATI users, fglrx sucks at this too). It even does hotplugging of display heads. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xorg7.3Integration It wil be shipping with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, but is available for testing if you are brave or have an alternate Ubuntu install.
- baalzebub, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6@ mikesty: ["Considering that the majority of the times an OS needs to be restored are not due to hard drive failure, a restore CD is really not that critical. Most of the issues I've run into are problems with the partition and file structure itself."]
your comment borders on contradicting itself, if there are problems with the partition & file structure then accessing this restore file and/or restore partition could very well be impossible and this is where a CD/DVD will be critical to getting the system restored or re-installed... - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7The article confirms a single Ubuntu-loaded Dell computer sale (it was misleading to include the FedEx person's comment, since the naive will flippantly assume it corresponds with Ubuntu sales). The vast majority of Dell's sales probably still are Windows computers and peripherals (especially monitors). I know saying this on Digg borders on thoughtcrime, but the lack of name recognition of "Ubuntu Linux" will probably kill this experiment. AMD had a vast following among gamers and sysadmins, but years after their introduction in Dell's inventory, they still form a tiny portion of Dell's sales. Ubuntu has even larger hurdles with the graphics drivers issues and flaky WPA support, along with the lack of i8kutils installed on laptops by default. A quiet exit from the Linux arena by Dell in a few weeks would not surprise me.
- leszek, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6@specialk16:
You will gain nothing if you reduce your swap size (just a tiny fraction of hard disk space).
If you want that your computer use less swap, you should modify the swappiness parameter.
You also need a swap partition at least as big as your RAM size if you want to be able to use the hibernation feature (suspend-to-disk). - caffeinelover, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7Unfortunately I agree. I would prefer that Linux succeed in the mainstream, but when a major vendor plans a small release of Linux, and this:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
is the recommendation, Linux will not succeed. Review stated "This worked like a charm on the first try" - well guess what - for 99% of the computer users out there, there would not have been a first try, because they never would have gotten a terminal window open. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7Considering that the majority of the times an OS needs to be restored are not due to hard drive failure, a restore CD is really not that critical. Most of the issues I've run into are problems with the partition and file structure itself.
- adrianmonk, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7[ @geminitojanus, who said this: "That rule has been obsolete for about 2-3 years now, especially in Linux; with more and more RAM becoming available for virtually nothing, it makes less and less sense to pawn off memory to your incredibly slow-ass disk device." ]
I would agree if it were a question of skimping on RAM and leaning on swap space as a (poor) substitute. However, that is not the motivator for the decision to have plenty of swap space.
The fact is, many computer users either don't know or don't care that using more memory will tend to slow down your computer. They are not going to proactively manage their behavior to keep memory usage reasonable and near the optimum operating parameters for their system. Instead, they will keep opening up more stuff until the cost/benefit ratio (slowness vs. convenience of not having to think about closing apps) gets bad enough that it becomes worth it to them to do something about it.
So there's a good chance a lot of users will use cause their machines to swap. The question then becomes this: when demand for memory gets high, which do you want, errors or slowness? When you're Dell, this all begets another question: how many support phone calls do you want to get? Their answer is going to be, quite logically, "as few as possible". You're right that RAM is cheap, but disk is cheap as well. Really cheap. So the cost of increasing the safety margin is small. - Dumbledorito, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4I haven't bought a Dell for a while, but I think they charge extra if you want an OS CD. One more way to make some cash.
- geminitojanus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5@rogers
....You're talking about Vista, right? - shadus, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6My biggest problem with major computer manufacturers anymore is that they don't include restore disks. There is -zero- reason they shouldn't include restore cds.
- TrisMcC, on 10/11/2007, -4/+7That is sort of weird that it did not include an install CD. I am typing this on my new E1505N with Ubuntu, and mine did come with an install CD -- it was the official Ubuntu CD. I even used it to reinstall the computer.
I had to also run 915resolution to set up the correct resolution of 1680x1050. From the factory (before I reinstalled it) it was set to 1280x1024. Not really nice looking. - Jeffrey903, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5honds - I haven't bought a Dell in years, but I know that they used to. Also, I sometimes setup the Dell computers that my non-technical friends get, and I believe that they do come with a Windows CD (it has a Dell logo on it, but it's still a Windows CD)
- binaryspiral, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Dell servers rarely come with OS discs and nothing but basic manuals - and they're a smidge more expensive that your XPS... I wouldn't say this was a dig at ubuntu users - it's just the way Dell is.
"Can we save $5 per unit shipped by not including printed material or media? Hell yeah... "
Shipping twenty thousand units this month - cha-ching. -
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