Monique Y. Herman wrote:I suspect that's what happens when such requests come in occasionally but if they
On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 at 03:14 GMT, alex penned:
What do you think of everyone on this list and other Linux lists sending a form letter to all computer vendors asking them if they have systemless computers or components that will work with Linux? Do you think that would give them some incentive to become interested in providing such computers and advertise them as such? As it is now, what incentive do they have ?
I'm not sure how many requests they have to get before they have an
effect. People are already asking now, aren't they? But maybe the
sales person on the other end doesn't report this request to his/her boss
receive similar messages by the hundreds or even thousands, somebody is bound
to wake up especially if they realize that similar messages are going to other
vendors.. Whether a form letter is used or not, they have to become aware
that there is a considerable population of Linux users in this world who could be
potential customers A form letter would indicate that the Linux population is
unified but that shouldn't preclude individuals from creating their own message.
For maximum effect, the effort should be coordinated so that the vendors' inboxes
became inundated and it should be repeated at regular intervals..
Whenever I call and ask I always make sure to have the salesman ask his supervisor. Failing that, I ask to personally speak to the supervisor.
That didn't work, did it? The answers I get include" We don't support Linux" and "I don't know". How do you think the supervisor would handle hundreds of messages arriving at the same time.? Wouldn't that be a wakeup call?
Even more so if it is mass mailing..
Maybe having the right address / point of contact is the key.
This is probably major point that is currently being overlooked.My old Quantex PII MMX 333 Mhz machine has 5 different Linux systems plus
Such a letter could be drafted and posted on lists along with as many major vendor addresses such as Tiger Direct . It could be designed so all one would have to do is copy it and the TO addresses and send it..
In my opinion, a form letter will not have as much impact as a number of individual letters. On the other hand, I don't know how much more of an impact a form letter has than no letter at all.
If they received 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 letters (boilerplate or not) saying "I want to buy your products, but I won't until you offer Linux support/OS-less machines/whatever," they will get their butts in gear.
Take a cheap desktop system, US$ 1000, times even only 10,000 potential customers. If there is a company out there willing to reject out of hand US$ 10,000,000 in potential sales, their shareholders need to know about some major high-level mismanagement.
My thought is the letter should not be system specific but use the word Linux in a generic sense..
Well, this poses problems, doesn't it? I agree with you in theory, but they want concrete facts, because they can probably be sued if they say "certified to work with linux" and then it turns out that some asshat is running redhat 6.2 and the driver support isn't present. So they want to be able to say "certified to work with X version of Y operating system." Problem is, I'd be pretty surprised if most new systems will work with, say, woody, right off the bat.
Ideally, they would say "certified to work with linux, and here, the linux drivers for all the hardware are on the CD we shipped with your system." Even that probably falls prey to issues of gcc versioning and whatnot, though ...
Windows 98SE running. Don't you think that new faster machines couldn't
be made to do this? There probably are some out there right now but how can
we tell which ones? My guess is that there just hasn't been any incentive
for manufacturers to 'bother' with even trying them on Linux. Could it be that
they don't have any Linux knowledgeable people working for them?.
If manufacturers were targeted with mass mailing, I'll bet you'll see "Wanted,
Linux geeks' in their hiring notices.
If the drivers are GPL (as most are), then a simple statement like support for this hardware is available in the Linux kernel version 2.4.21 and higher (or whatever), since GPL drivers tend to got included in the kernel. They can even give some suggestions, like: "The Linux kernel version 2.4.21 is available as part of Red Hat 9, Mandrake 9.2 and SUSE 9.1," or something like that (I'm pulling version numbers out of the air).
Yes, why not at least include qualifiers? But, I still cannot accept the idea
that new and faster computers couldn't be made that can run any Linux system.
and for a price no higher than what it is today.
Who knows, perhaps if the machines available today were tested, there might
be many that are fully compatible with Linux. There's no incentive to do this.
alex
-Roberto
alex
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