rackIT @ GWD

Lenovo and Novell announced an agreement today that will pre-load Suse (Novell) Linux on new notebook systems beginning at the end of this year. My source at Lenovo tells me that this applies to notebooks in the T Series, which haven’t been announced yet. “The T Series is our most popular class of notebooks that are geared to typical business users.” the source said. So why is this news now? Dell and Lenovo announced pre-loaded Linux a year ago to no great fanfare outside of the Linux community. The market is different now; mounting user dis-satisfaction over Microsoft products, and the cool reception of Windows Vista both contribute to vendors desire to offer more to consumers. These latest Linux offerings are aimed specifically at enterprise too – previous efforts were geared toward the home market. Interestingly, Linux users account for nearly 4% of operating system market share – the same percentage of marketshare that belongs to Apple – not bad for a product with no corporate marketing money behind it. The notebooks from Lenovo will hit the streets in the last quarter 2007. The full press release follows:

Lenovo and Novell to Offer Linux Preload on ThinkPad Notebooks
Agreement to Accelerate Desktop Linux in the Enterprise

LINUXWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO – Aug. 6, 2007 – Lenovo and Novell today announced an agreement to provide preloaded Linux* on Lenovo ThinkPad notebook PCs and to provide support from Lenovo for the operating system. The companies will offer SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 from Novell® to commercial customers on Lenovo notebooks including those in the popular ThinkPad T Series, a class of notebooks aimed at typical business users, beginning in the fourth quarter of 2007. The ThinkPad notebooks with the Linux-preload will also be available for purchase by individual customers.
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Kaspersky AV 6.0 can be had for around $50.00 (USD) with a rebate up to $65.00 (USD) – so that means “free”. Point your browser too the link/image on the right to pick it up and then go here to get the rebate form – it’s a pdf. The offer is good through the 11th of August so not much time. Kaspersky makes a good product – we recommend it to all of our customers because of their quick response times to zero days and other such problems. Subscription fees are about half of Symantec and McAfee products too.

Many people have dual boot Linux/Windows systems. While it’s fairly easy to access files on the Windows partition from Linux*, it’s not usually that easy to access your Linux partition from Windows. Instead of emailing that entire website that you just finished coding with BlueFish to yourself so you can access the files from a Windows program, (I don’t know why you would need to do this, but hey. You never know.), all you have to do is install the Ext2 Installable File System for Windows. This program gives you R/W access to an Ext2 partition from any version of Windows from NT4 through 2003. It supports paging (Windows swap), and has a pretty nifty interface from the Windows control panel, as well as the Windows native disk manager. The programmer, Stephan Schreiber did a nice job integrating with Windows. I’ve tried it on one of my virtual boxes and it works like a charm. As freeware, the price is right too.

*The ease in which one can access Windows partitions and even “hidden” SMB network shares is trivial. I’ve had full “root” access to a Windows Active Directory domain controller without providing any credentials over LAN from a box running Gnome on Slackware 10. How’s that for security? Microsoft has since made it a bit harder to do this type of thing – not too much harder though.