451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Emperor Linux: Pre-Installed Linux on Enterprise Laptops
Nick Selby, April 13, 2006 @ 4:15 pm ETBeing one of the few Linux-on-the-desktop users in the 451 organization (451 uses hardened CentOS on all its servers and various Linux flavors for mission critical apps, plus LAMP on the web servers), I have a special purchase case when it comes to the new laptop. With my ancient Dell Inspiron 5150 running Breezy experiencing keyboard twazz (it’s also missing the letter ‘g’) and locking up now and then for various reasons probably related to hard drive fatigue, it was time for a new machine.
And I’m busy as all hell. I met with Emperor Linux at Linux World Boston, and said, “Well, why would we pay you $2200 for a ThinkPad which costs $1800, and the guys there had a really compelling answer: “Well, because everything – everything – will work right out of the box,” they said. Close the lid and it suspends; open it and it resumes. The wireless card has a WPA supplicant and EL’s own wireless manager for seamless wifi association; the MTU patch and TCP window tweaks for EVDO, the fingerprint reader…You get the idea.
I thought about it: it took me about two weeks to pimp up this Dell the way I wanted, the NDIS wrapper, nm-applet, Sun Java, multimedia support, VMWare, yadda yadda yadda. And it came down to this: for $400 more than IBM wanted, and about the same price as a similarly tricked-out HP laptop, I get a fingerprint reader, a year of Linux support and the Lenovo factory warranty. I lose hacker cred but I have a Gentoo box at home for that.
EL tells us its main business now is selling into enterprise, universities, healthcare and the military. Its average deal with enterprise would be something like 20 or 40 ruggedized machines to an oil and has exploration company, or 30 tablets to a hospital, or God knows what to some three-letter agency. We reckon we’re talking about an average deal size around $80,000-$100,000, for well-functioning, rock solid, warrantied hardware, and the OS support no one else seems to want to offer without buying an enterprise distro of something with a nice professional services contract.
There used to be a smattering of these preconfigured Linux laptop VARs around, but no longer – now EL could only remember the name of one other, Linux Certified – and they seem to be targeting the consumer market. I wonder why this kind of VAR activity hasn’t taken off. To me the most valuable thing was the realization that for an extra $600 to $800 or so over what I would buy otherwise, I have saved two entire weeks of tweaking, lurking in chat rooms, kernel compiles and mailing lists, and gained two weeks of … Well, of writing reports for 451!
We’ll probably speak with EL again soon.
Comments (13) Categories: Software
Do you know if Emperor Linux will provide Windows drivers if you decided to run a dual boot configuration ?
Will they support other Linux distros , like say you wanted to use SUSE Linux 10.0.?
I love Linux but sometimes I still need to boot into Windows XP and it would be nice if they could provide drivers for Windows XP so I can have a dual boot machine. That will be really sweet.
Yep. Their standard configuration is with a / , a /home and /hibernate and /swap partitions but they always ask if you want dual boot and can set that up as well. See their Distro list.
Emperor Linux does provide a dual-boot option, but I wouldn’t recommend using their service. They are slow so ship, the tech support is terrible but the worse part is that they install their own kernel version that causes many problems if you try to tweak things yourself. Look for another company to do it
“Do you know if Emperor Linux will provide Windows drivers if you decided to run a dual boot configuration ?”
They don’t seem too thrilled about it, but they’ll drop Windows on its own partition for dual boot. Most of their vendors require a windows license to purchase their machines anyhow.
“Will they support other Linux distros , like say you wanted to use SUSE Linux 10.0.?”
They’ll support almost any distro, but the kernel they provide with the distro is their own. They provide all of the source code for their kernel build. There kernel contains only what you need to run your laptop. The X they provide looks and runs much better than any distro.
Which is exactly why I have been using Macs for the last 5 years. Never figured out why I should waste my life configuring X-11 to make my Linux machine not hurt my eyes or look like something I wish I had instead.
Thanks Boris. As someone in my LUG pointed out, Mac is open source-ish and solid and performs very well. I have nothing but respect for Mac. But it is just not for me. I am totally dedicated to several things which don’t quite make it over. First of all, regardless of the feelings of many on the Gnome window manager, I love it. I find it sexy, sleek, configurable, fast, stable and polished. Is OSX better? Certainly in some ways, certainly not in some others. But the “let’s hide the workings from the user” mentality drives me mad.
At the end of the day, it’s cause Linux is what I like. When I started using it in 1995 or 1996, Windows was atrocious and Apple in the worst phase in its history (a senior Apple executive once visited my house in Spain, saw the 6200CD being used as a paperweight in my office and said, “Dude…Sorry.”) I was left with shouting into the wind or learning Linux. I did the latter, and I have never gone back – despite trying, really trying to love my beautiful 17″ PowerBook last year. I lasted a month before returning it in favor of Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog on a Compaq notebook.
I am totally used to the idea that I can populate my machine with open source software, and get everything I need – productivity, coding, image manipulation and monitoring software free as the air.
I am not opposed to paying for software – I bought, personally, unreimbursed and with my own money, the Canvas penetration platform from Immunity Inc, and have purchased open source software in the past from Igloo. People work hard and wanna get paid, good on em. When the software is as good as what those guys make, I am a happy customer and would do it again any time.
And last, I don’t actually spend all that much time configuring X to be rock solid and gorgeous. Many have done that work for me. I own about 10 computers, varying from a bunch of junk to a couple of sexy beasts, and configuring them is a snap, a breeze. Setting up Gentoo the first time was a drama, but an educational one, and that was in fact the reason I did it. Installing Ubuntu, Mandriva, Linspire, Red Hat or Suse is no more challenging than installing Windows or even OSX.
I respect Mac as a platform and respect the choice of many to use it – hell, even our Open Source guru Raven Zachary runs an Intel Mac and loves the hell out of it. I turn green with envy at some of the multimedia capabilities. I observe some of the same pain in the Mac world as the Linux world when we’re collectively blocked from enjoying some of the basic functions enjoyed by the Windows world – but both Mac and Linux users eventually work it out or get a hack going, and we share in the fun sooner or later.
But my post was really about the concept of paying a competent, creative company a bit more over the value of the raw laptop to save me some time and get me going on my work machine. As more and more companies make the switch to Linux on the Desktop – and believe you me, more and more are – VARs like Emperor will become more important to the world of enterprise IT.
That’s hilarious.
I’ve been a Mac girl all my life, except through the great unpleasantness. I bought a Macintosh Classic in 1993, then had a Linux laptop until the original Bondi blue iMacs came out in 1998.
Boris – I’m with ya. I’ve been using a Mac since, what…1993? Just before that I was using a NeXT. I can’t tell you how pleased I was reading the New York Times over Christmas break in 1996 and seeing the Apple acquisition of NeXT. Greatness. I’m sitting here typing on my MacBook Pro in Mac OS X, and can boot into Fedore Core 5 using Parallels. I love my setup.
Raven,
Don’t EVEN get me started. I still miss my NeXT slab sitting at my eCollege office in 2000. But, with Parallels, I’ve heard that someone has gotten OpenStep installed in a virtual machine.
Actually, that’s just too silly to even try to mimic.
On a more serious note. After 10 years of using Redhat Derivatives, I’ve given up the RPM world and gone Debian. I thought that I would stick with Ubuntu because it seems to have both the end user and the enterprise end user in mind.
However, Elive Linux (also a Debian derivative) just released an alpha ISO for x86 machines that has your choice of Enlightenment .16 or .17. For once, someone, with the inclusion of the not so moribund Enlightenment windowmanager, has made a serious step forward (albeit, a small one) in improving the general computer system UI that’s basically been unchanged since MacOS 7 (Windows, GNOME, KDE…all just copies in my opinion).
Jeb – thanks for that. I will definitely check out Elive, and I agree with you on Enlightenment. I haven’t played with it for about a year but ven back then it was already, as you said, one of the first seriously innovative new UIs out there in a long, long time.
Someone else in my Linux User Group pointed out that R3 had a similar offering of preconfigured notebooks with Fedora Core for a bit less. I looked and saw that they seemed to be white label boxes, but only glanced for a second. Anyone had any experience with the R3 crowd?
Companies selling preinstalled Linux and no-OS
“The List”
http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/23168/
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