Is Kubuntu participating in Dell's Sputnik project?

[Fox7777]

Dell Computers is selling Ubuntu or Kubuntu computers around the world including a recent big promotion in India. There is currently a big development push to get Ubuntu or Kubuntu ultrabooks ready for the US market. It is codenamed Sputnik and details are at http://dell.com/sputnik . The default Sputnik software right now has the hard to use Gnome desktop which makes no sense to a lot of people. I installed their current software on a 64-bit computer and added the KDE desktop but that is not as good as installing Kubuntu. Is Kubuntu working on Dell's new ultrabook so it will be ready for the US market? Thanks.

[ferri]

I plan to replace my old notebook. I have not decided between HP and Dell yet.
And this is good point for Dell.

[claydoh]

I don't see Kubuntu mentioned anywhere. You can always simply install a default Kubuntu on it and if needed add any tweaks to it
http://hwe.ubuntu.com/uds-q/dellxps/
As most of the stuff done is under the hood, it is rather out of the scope of the Kubuntu team, though it would be cool to have a Kubuntu image. I don't see it happening, we are small fish in a big Linux pond

........and I don't see a huge number of people spending that much money on such hardware, generally speaking.

*drools over the Dell*, however I currently have a deep lust for the new Vizio laptops

[woodsmoke]

Kubuntu installed easily on both my Sony Vaio(multi-boot with Vista), and a Toshiba satellite( 6 years old now).

woodsmoke

[charles052]

When it comes to laptops, I always go with HP. I've never had a problem with Kubuntu on an HP machine. Dell on the other hand....

[claydoh]

When it comes to laptops, I always go with HP. I've never had a problem with Kubuntu on an HP machine. Dell on the other hand....

lol my experiences have been the opposite, but not necessarily because of OS.

[whatthefunk]

It looks like this is aimed at developers, not your ordinary user.

[GreyGeek]

Given DELL's past performance with Linux I am skeptical. I suspect that they are using "Sputnik" as a veiled threat in order to extract better terms from Microsoft. Microsoft will ignore them and they'll drop the ploy.

[pauly]

I used to have an hp. It wasn't terrible but the nvidia graphics driver and the broadcom network driver were sometimes problematic. I now have a samsung and all the drivers are intel. Works like a charm. I really don't think it's the brand of laptop. It really has to do with the hardware used.

[woodsmoke]

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...this_fall.html

woodsmoke

[mdye]

Hey not sure if anyone's still paying attention to this, but just thought I'd pipe up with a couple thoughts: I have this laptop, and, after adding the Sputnik PPAs, it works quite well! The only real issue is that if you change the screen brightness with the keyboard (something that is only possible with the Sputnik kernel on the PPA) KDE doesn't seem to know anything about it - that is, there's no visual cue that the screen brightness changed (though the physical brightness does change.) Oddly, this isn't a problem with GNOME - that is, in both Unity and GNOME shell, the screen brightness popup appears. (I'm currently trying out the GNOME remix - I haven't decided if I want to go with Kubuntu or stay in GNOME territory - I'm put off by having to log into Google sync every time I reboot.)

Otherwise, everything seems to work hardware-wise. I've not encountered any issues at all with anything that has been traditional deal-breakers - suspend/resume/hybernate all work; wifi works out of the box and even adding the PPA is trivially easy. So far, it's awesome.