Now in most areas in South East Asia, its pretty normal to buy a laptop without an OS, but the model range is not that great. You get nice brands like IBM and Compaq to mid-range models from BenQ, ASUS and Acer and finally to brands which are most likely alien to consumers like Blue and Neo (these are probably whitebox offerings from Taiwan-based manufacturers). But what is common with these OS-less offerings is that they are usually "bundled" with a "Linux OS". It's not installed, but you have an installation CD included. You get different distributions depending on the brand of the laptop (Acer usually bundles Red Flag or an old version of Mandriva). My BenQ purchase had Linpus 9.2 "bundled" along with 2 CDs for an anti-virus and hardware drivers obviously for Windows. Since I wanted a cheap unit that is powerful enough for my needs but won't make me cry when it gets trashed in a year, I always make sure I have an Ubuntu desktop CD to test out the unit before making a purchase. But before I do that, I ask the people behind the counter (usually the tech guys) about the product they are selling which roughly goes like this (the language is Filipino):
Me: Anong OS po kasama nito? (What OS does this unit have?)So what does this little experience tell us? You can get a laptop with Linux "bundled" but the consumer is greatly discouraged to use the bundle for various reasons and instead to go Windows even if it means piracy to make the sale.
Tech Person: Linux lang po... (It's only Linux...)
Me: OK lang ba na Linux ang gamit ko dito? (Is it OK if I use Linux with this unit?)
Tech Person: Ay mahirap po yan! Hindi pa installed, kayo ang bahala...(Oh that would be hard! It's not even installed and you have to install it yourself...)
Me: Paano yan? (What do we do?)
Tech Person: Mahal po kasi ang orig na copy ng Windows, pero dagdagan niyo na lang ng konti, install ko na lang ng pirated para may magamit kayo...tutal may anti-virus naman na kasama...wala din kami support sa Linux... (An original copy of Windows is expensive, but if you add a little more of the price, I will just install a pirated copy so you will have something to use...its alright since you have the anti-virus with you...and we don't have support for Linux...)
Now if we have certain laptop brands that are certified to run on Ubuntu, taking advantage of all hardware (modems especially), even have the bling turned on by default, it might be a different story. Having a preloaded unit with Ubuntu and marketed as if it was a "premium" model may change the way consumers look at OS-less laptops sold in the market. This may not be the same for the server market, since sysads are used to installing on their own, but a baseline installation of Ubuntu server can be a good proposition, after all, the server CD has almost all the stuff you need. However, OEM is a complicated market and providing an OEM installer is just one part of the puzzle (Ubuntu's OEM installer is great though, but does not have documentation hotness last time I checked).
Now my story with my BenQ purchase won't be complete without actually installing Linpus. I sure was able to install it successfully, but I still erased the thing and installed Edgy, but I can't help but smile when I stumbled upon this error message on the installer of Linpus:
Perhaps Ubuntu can clean up that bad magic in the future? For ordinary users, this "bad magic" error doesn't make any sense. They would probably even laugh at it. So having users install the bundle and get an error like this will most likely result to the bundle not being used at all.
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