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According to rumors making their way around the web, Dell will begin shipping its first round of Ubuntu equipped PCs later this week. The founder of LinuxQuestions.org claims that a Dell employee sent him a leaked email which says the new Ubuntu machines will [go on sale Thursday][2].
Although Dell has not made any official announcement yet, John Hull, Dell's Manager of Linux OS Technologies, has published a short overview of what customers can expect on their new Ubuntu PCs when they are released.
"Before we announce the availability of Ubuntu 7.04 on select Dell client systems, I'd like to give an overview of what customers can expect from our initial Ubuntu offering," Hull writes in his post. He goes on to say that "the default software from the Ubuntu media will be installed on the system, including kernel and applications."
Hull says Dell will configure and install open-source hardware drivers whenever possible, but will use "partial open-source or closed-source drivers where there is no equivalent open-source driver." The main source of non-open drivers will be Intel wireless cards and Conexant modems.
Interestingly, Hull also notes that "at this time, we are not including any support for proprietary audio or video codecs that are not already distributed with Ubuntu 7.04."
Due to patent law restrictions the default version of Ubuntu does not ship with support for formats like MPEG, WMA, DVD, QuickTime, and other proprietary codecs, however, it's not hard for users to install support for those formats.
According to the leaked email, the initial Dell PCs to offer Ubuntu will include the Inspiron E1505 laptop ($700 to $1100), the Dimension E520 desktop (starts at $370 sans monitor) and the somewhat nicer XPS 410 desktop ($900 to $2500).
[1]: http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/05/21/15563.aspx "Ubuntu 7.04 Offering—Technical Details"
[2]: http://jeremy.linuxquestions.org/2007/05/18/dell-announces-the-models-for-ubuntu/ "Dell announces the models for Ubuntu"
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