Lenovo Preloads SUSE Linux on ThinkPad Laptops

Published: August 7, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The semi-annual LinuxWorld trade show kicked off in San Francisco yesterday, and commercial Linux distributor Novell announced a partnership with Chinese PC maker Lenovo whereby Lenovo will pre-install SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on its ThinkPad laptops and offer one-throat-to-choke support for SLED 10 to its customers.

Lenovo is, of course, the company that acquired IBM's beleaguered PC business last year and, as many watchers of Big Blue expected, has turned it around into a profitable company. And because Linux is popular in Lenovo's home market of China as well as in its acquired markets in Europe and North America, the company is going to pre-install Linux on selected PCs and offer customers a single support contract for the combination of hardware and software. This is what PC makers have done with Windows for decades, and it is one of the reasons why Microsoft has been eager for prebundling deals. By giving PC makers a slight discount, it can offload all but the peskiest technical support questions to the hardware vendors, making itself all that more profitable. And vendors have liked such deals too, since they get Windows at a steep discount and, unless and until something goes wrong on a customer's machine, they don't have to spend a lot of dough to make that extra operating system money.

Like other desktop and notebook PC makers, Lenovo is taking baby steps in bringing Linux support to its product line, since it costs money to test and certify an operating system on each machine, and presumably even more money to dedicate tech support resources for an operating system to each machine that has Linux pre-installed. So, SLED 10 is only going to be available preloaded on ThinkPad T series laptops for now, and only beginning in the fourth quarter.

Lenovo, and IBM before it, had certified SUSE and Red Hat Linux to run on particular desktops and laptops, and it offered help desk support for Linux on its ThinkPad T60 dual-core workstations starting last year. This is the first time that Lenovo is putting Linux on the machine ahead of time and then offering full support for both an operating system and a hardware platform. Security and other operating system patches for SLED 10 will be provided directly to ThinkPad users by Novell's online Yast support tool.

"We have seen more customers utilizing and requesting open source notebook solutions in education, government and the enterprise since our ThinkPad T60p Linux announcement, and today's announcement expands upon our efforts by offering customers more Linux options," explained Sam Dusi, vice president, product marketing of Lenovo's notebook business unit, Lenovo.

The question now, as always, is when PC vendors will just do what needs to be done to get Linux rolling on the desktop and laptop, and that is to pre-install both Red Hat or SUSE Linux on every PC they sell, just as they do with Microsoft's Windows XP and Windows Vista platform. Level the playing field, and Linux might have a radically different adoption curve--particularly among enterprise customers who aren't supposed to be playing games on their machines anyway.

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