I've been e-mailing all the 'barebones' UK suppliers listed on http://nakedcomputers.org/category/europe/uk/ and offer my response to pcspecialist below. It would be good to see this initiative spread beyond the UK.
On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 12:07 +0000, Danny Williams - PC Specialist Ltd wrote: > The main problem is that drivers, such as touchpad drivers, are hard to come > by and customers who use Linux are normally more technically minded and are > able to get their laptops working as required. If we listed Ubuntu we would > then be required to support this operating system, and if we were to sell > this to a customer who has little knowledge of computers or Linux, it would > be very difficult to support them. Thanks for getting back to me on this. I fully understand this, and am aware that you have a policy of not supporting Ubuntu. Drivers are an area on which the Ubuntu community work and will usually be able to provide a solution. Our main problem is the growing number of disaffected Windows users who have little technical ability, and are starting to upgrade to Ubuntu. We have a wiki page at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuPre-installed for the benefit of those companies who do supply pre-loaded machines, but I am going to make available a wiki page at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/barebones to use in co-operation with companies such as yourselves. It will only be available to list fully tested PC's and Laptops. If you feel able to co-operate with us in that area, we will put in whatever work is necessary. I would personally be willing to come to your factory and assist with testing. It would be great if the end result was a range of three PC specs and three Laptop specs that we could support fully. The choice would be low end, medium and high end. As a start, my PC spec (which you have there) is already fully tested and could be offered as a mid-range PC. I'm running a 32 bit install of Lucid 10.04 and a second installation of Natty 11.04 testing 64 bit version. Laptops are obviously slightly more problematical. You are aware of touchpad driver problems - these are largely a thing of the past and a test installation of Maverick 11.10 would probably work straight out of the box on most machines. The wi-fi card is another thing that can usually work with an available proprietary driver. And there's no reason why we at Ubuntu could not offer a customised download on the downloads page! Please give this some consideration. Support is easy for us as a community. All you would be offering is testing or facilities for us to test for you. Now Ubuntu is making headway into major firms - Great Ormond Street Hospital and SpecSavers to name but two - we see a rapid rise in use here in the UK. With regard to your Linux forum, that was made available at my suggestion and I am grateful for that. I try to give such support as I am able, but am well aware that some of your employees who lurk there have more than a passing knowledge of Linux. In summary, there's no need for you to list Ubuntu, instead let us list tried and tested products for you. Kind regards, Barry. -- Barry Drake is a member of the the Ubuntu Advertising team. http://ubuntuadverts.org/ _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-advertising Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-advertising More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
