Crazy Days

Dell to ship Linux...Checkout the Numbers

Wow finally this is happening...at least/hopefully will happen in the future. For the longest time I was obsessed with Dell laptops and desktops as a brand for no particular reason. Yet I was also annoyed by the fact that they didn't have a non-Windows/PC-DOS/Linux versions of their laptops on the online portal. This was brought up in several encounters with Dell representatives, and they took it pretty cool and agreed that is something should be looked at, but that was just a marketers promise which was never kept.

For some time there were rather rumers and then announcements on the Dell web site about Dell shipping with Linux (or rather OS free machines). For a moment I though this is cool and then slowly started looking at the situation from another perspective, and realized that this is not gonna cost a bang.

I always believed and still believe that, the best way to take Linux to common users are through enterprises. From what I've seen most of the common users (like my wife) use a home PC to continue their IT life at office from home. They prefer to have the same email client, the Word processors and not to mention the Operating System as well. This remain a barrier on Linux adoption in most of the situations. Besides enterprise computing is far superior in numbers compared to home computers (at least from my experience).

The latest move with dell is really targeting the household market or the home computing sector, which has already decided on Ubuntu. This move brings to my mind that vendors are most of the times one step behind the cutting edge. Two years ago I could've agreed on this move since Linux was not really enterprise ready, but today Linux is fully enterprise ready, although Ubuntu might not be the best selection, but there are other alternatives. In fact as one blog explains, if the numbers are correct Dell is expecting a market share of maximum 1% of there total sales volumes, which is 20k units, so we can expect the total number of computers to ship with Linux to be around 200, which indeed is a insignificant adoption. After seeing the numbers I feel, is this something to blog about...

On the other hand for enterprise markets Dell should've shipped with Novell SLED or RedHat Enterprise Desktop (I haven't seen RH), which is really enterprise ready, and I believe enterprises are ready to accept these as well. I fear this has rather become a chicken and egg situation for the enterprise adoption.

Anyway now I can buy my next laptop with Ubuntu....if it ever going to be Dell. Or I rather divert my crusade towards another vendor when I'm in touch with the corporate world once again.

Land of Black Gold

This is a great way to break silence. I've been silent for some time since lot of things happened with my life which I don't consider to be happy. Though I call this is the land of black gold it's mainly natural gas. Yes people now I live in Qatar, the third largest natural gas producer in the world.

Apartment we live in give a picturesque towards downtown Doha from the fifth floor, of a reasonably tall building, which really reminds me of Tatooine. Still I can't find any resemblance to Dune though, because we're far away from them I guess. Should go check them out once I buy some wheels.

The moment I arrive here, I was surprised by the heat. After living in a tropical country for more than 29 years I never felt heat more intense than this. The day after I landed the, during the noon recoded the highest ever I have experienced 41 Celsius, which was really shocking. First thing first....had to find a cap and a pair of corrected shades. Sun is so bright in this part of the world I have never seen sun light pure white, or at least I have never noticed in SL. Not to mention it is very difficult to keep my eyes open during the day time outside.

Qatar is some what a cosmopolitan society. Still there are many restrictions exists, inherited from the fundamental Arab world. In a way it is glad to see Qatar at this level after sharing a border to Saudi Arabia which I heard to be quite the opposite to this. This is worst than London I believe when it comes to cultural mix, when I visited the UK last November, one thing I notice is that 80% of the population (in London) was not English (lots of Indians, Chinese ,Arabs and East Europeans), but here I don't know whether there are any Qatari nationals since majority are Indians, Sri Lankans and Filipinos and most of the people in Arabic dress code seems to be either Egyptian or Lebanese (referring to women). May be I have still not figured out how to identify Qataris.

News papers are fascinating over here, not much gossip, murder stories or politics, so in a way it's fun to read news papers at the same time I'm missing the frustration (which was quite fun) I used to experience back in SL.

Finally, technology is booming over this end, they're giving cable TV over ADSL2 (I guess) which was new to me and I guess to many others as well, but the sad story is that the Qatar GNU/Linux User Group (RMS should love this country) had no movements since I joined the group. Compared to LKLUG that is a dead list. And if some one from Dialog Telkom read this, you guys are doing a great job with your customer services, it sux over here, keep up the good work. Still couldn't fix my GPRS to work properly, because these guys have no clue to what they're doing. I'm quite disappointed since my Java apps in the phone are not working.