HP to Ship Compaq Business PC with Pre Installed Suse Linux

Good news for all holiday buyers and open source software supporters.

HP today announced its plans to introduce Linux as an operating system choice for business desktop customers. After Dell, HP the leader in worldwide Linux server shipments and revenue, has introduced a new desktop offering with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop from Novell on the HP Compaq dc5850. The offerings are designed to help small businesses enhance their productivity and ease their management of technology. You will get productivity software like:

OpenOffice.org
Web browser
Multimedia tools
Email
AppArmor security protection
Collaboration and instant messaging software and many other high quality open source software

For education customers, HP is working with Novell to develop and maintain a repository of more than 40 applications, including math, art and word games, to improve student learning. In addition, applications for school administration and instruction will be available for teachers and administrators.

We are excited to expand our work with HP to take advantage of the high-growth desktop Linux space. As the best-engineered and most interoperable Linux desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop helps customers increase security and improve productivity. With the focus on educational users, this affordable joint offering delivers a solid learning platform and prepares students with 21st-century technology skills. - Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager, Open Platform Solutions, Novell.

Pricing and availability

The HP Compaq dc5850 with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is expected to be available Dec. 15, 2008 in North America at a U.S. street price of $519. HP won't charge extra for preloading SuSE Linux on the machines.

PC config options

Processor - Various AMD processor configuration (Sempron to Phenom)
Chipset - AMD 780V
Max. RAM - 8 GB DDR2 SDRAM
Graphics - Integrated AMD Radeon 3100 Graphics or NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS (256MB SH) PCIe x16
or ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT (256MB DH) PCIe x16
HDD - 80 to 250GiB SATA
SATA DVD/CD-RW combo
And all other usual stuff such as Audio, USP ports etc

Say hello to Virutal Mozilla Firefox ( HP Virtual Solutions for Windows Desktop )

On a related news HP also announced the expansion of its virtualized browsing solution across select business desktop products. The first-of-its-kind Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solution was developed with Symantec and Mozilla for HP customers. The solution uses the standard release of Mozilla Firefox with a Symantec Software Virtualization Solution layer that allows customers to use the Internet productively while keeping business PCs stable and easier to support.

Important things to know about Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solutions:

When resetting Firefox, your user profile (bookmarks, display preferences, installed extensions, etc.) is preserved.
When resetting Firefox, downloads saved to your desktop and under “My Documents” are preserved, so use these locations for things you want to keep!
Firefox is frequently updated to get the latest security fixes out to users. When you reset Firefox, it will go back to a baseline installation. Firefox will then automatically find the latest update and re-install it for you.

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 msian_tux_lover December 13, 2008 at 7:58 am: This is certainly good news. Regardless of what a vocal minority of the Open Source people think, SLED is currently the easiest and has the highest compatibilty with MS’ technology of all the “Enterprise” distros.
I will not go as far as to call it the best engineered Linux desktop, but it’s stable and consistent.
Novell has been around forever (in computing years) and as such many MS diehard fanboys or those who are suspicious (or detractors) of Open Source/Free Software will be less reluctant to move to or use Linux with Novell behind SLED.
Hopefully, that choice will soon be made available in Asia Pacific soon.
Eric
2 awpoopy December 19, 2008 at 3:50 pm: Ubuntu would be a better choice.
And look, I’m not even going to explain why.