Dell’s Project Sputnik is an experiment to develop a Linux-powered laptop aimed at developers. The project is still in its early stages, but Dell and Canonical already offer a version of Ubuntu 12.04 Linux for the company’s XPS 13 ultrabook.
Up until now if you’ve wanted to try Linux on the Dell XPS 13, you’ve had to download the image and install it yourself. But this week Dell kicked off a new Beta program that will offer a limited number of laptops preloaded with Ubuntu.
In fact, Dell is promising to sell XPS 13 ultrabooks with Ubuntu at discounted prices to a limited number of folks who apply online. The company hasn’t explained just how discounted these laptops will be. But since they’re shipping with software Dell considers beta, users aren’t just expected to apply because they want a cheap laptop. They’re also expected to help kick the tires and test the software.
Dell first unveiled Project Sputnik in May. Now it looks like the project is starting to pick up steam.
Dell also introduced a new wiki and forum for the project recently.
via Ultrabook News
Too bad I don’t want anything to do with Canonical (failboat) or Dell (Microsoft’s little bitch, with poor quality service/products too boot).
agree on lack of quality on dell’s part… but what’s wrong with canonical?
As a company they are not interested in the consumers they currently have and so they keep chasing unicorns while losing any that they actually do manage to find.
As far as Ubuntu goes they fail at design (though *some* of their work has been good), release management and most disappointingly testing/procedures.
Other less funded (read “unfunded”) projects perform admirably at these points while additionally also contributing back upstream at the same time (usually)… So it is obviously just incompetence and possibly sabotage by management holding them back. They get stuff from upstream (the Debian project, and other notable open source projects) and just fuck it up by mixing their lousy crap in rather than actually fixing problems upstream. They’re basically just a modding team, and not a terribly great one at that when compared to the Linux Mint project (oh, and BTW LMDE proves that they don’t have to base off Ubuntu).
Related the whole Canonical not contributing upstream thing (and the “code isn’t the only way…” excuse is pretty lame, don’t try that with me) is the way they parade work spearheaded by other people as their own due to their great (ok, not great, but pretty good) marketing. Their so-called work on improvements for Linux on ARM has be mostly thanks to the heavy lifting of other projects and companies (Debian, Genesi, Fedora…).
I won’t say anything about the Ubuntu community in general besides that I’ve got absolutely nothing positive to say. Hopefully they eventually move to greener pastures and have good habits drilled into them.
Trollbait taken I guess.
The form forces you to enter a Twitter handle. Good thinking Dell; everyone knows that any legitimate developer uses Twitter. That’s actually where I store all of my code.
Shame on Dell to force US to buy a Windows licence.
Everyone should boycott this company and put money in Small companies like System76
Developer? What kind of developer? Ah, here it is straight from Dell, emphasis mine:
“To put it in context, Sputnik is part of an effort by Dell to better understand and serve the needs of *developers in Web companies*.”
So web developers. I sure wish they’d refer to this as a “laptop for web developers” in the marketing, but what are the chances?