[ILUG] Buying PC's with Linux Pre-Installed

[Brendan Halpin]

John Kinsella <john.kinsella at ul.ie> writes:

> Hi. I'm buying some PC's from Dell for my Dept. here in UL. Most are 
> coming with Win*** but I thought I'd test the water & ask for a Linux 
> build on one of them.
> 
> I am being asked to pay £40 over the cost of a Widows licence.
> 
> Am I being done? Presumably they would claim that building Linux is a 
> low volume activity & that therefore they have to recover their costs.
> 
> Obviously I could buy a bare machine but I am interested in this as an 
> experiment.

I (also at UL) did this, and I have to admit it was fun to find a
machine running Linux (RH6.2) out of the box. Unfortunately, the
partitioning was a bit screwy -- lots of free space in /usr, little
in /home -- so I re-partitioned and re-installed anyway. It took a
little twiddling to get everything to the state before the
reinstall (e.g. edits to /etc/fstab, XF86config, etc.) but that had
more to do with my inexperience than anything else. 

Of course, the burning issue is whether MS get any licence fee when
you buy the Linux-only box...

Brendan

-- 
Brendan Halpin, Dept of Government and Society, Limerick University, Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147; f +353-61-202569; h +353-61-385276; Room S1-03 x 3147
<mailto:brendan.halpin at ul.ie>        <http://wivenhoe.staff8.ul.ie/~brendan>