Lenovo to sell pre-loaded Linux ThinkPads

Lenovo has announced that it will bundle Novell SUSE Linux with some of its Thinkpad laptops. Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought the Thinkpad business from IBM -- I've bought two Lenovo laptops to run Ubuntu on in the past year, a huge, high-powered T60p and a little X60 tablet, and I've been really happy with both machines. They run Ubuntu Linux really well, and they're solid as hell, putting up with a great deal of abuse. Lenovo even claims that their keyboards are water-proof (there are drainage holes on the underside of the computer that connect up with channels running from the keyboard). I haven't tried it yet, though.

I bought my last Lenovo from Emperor Linux, who charge a premium in exchange for pre-installing Linux and supporting it. The pre-installation wasn't much of anything, but the support has been drop-dead awesome -- if you need something fixed in your kernel, you can call them up, run a little script that gives them access to your machine, and they'll remotely login to it and fix it for you.

It's exciting to see Lenovo starting to supply Linux-loaded machines, but disappointing that they chose Novell as a partner. Novell teamed up with Microsoft in a weird deal to shield their Linux customers from Microsoft patent lawsuits. No one really thinks that Microsoft plans on suing companies that run Linux -- rather, this is a naked attempt to shake down Linux distributors for protection money by scaring big companies with nebulous threats about patent violations in Linux.

After that scuzzy little play, I have zero interest in giving Novell any support, money, or positive attention. So for now, I'll stick with Emperor.

The first ThinkPad being offered with SLED 10 pre-installed is the ThinkPad T60p, one of Lenovo's core business-oriented machines. It boasts an Intel CoreDuo 2GHz processor and can handle up to 2GB of memory. The graphics capability is nothing to sneeze at, either: the T60p has an ATI FireGL V5200. Lenovo will offer software and hardware support, but Novell will manage software updates. The company hasn’t announced any pricing details for the new machines.

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