Today Dell announced that by the end of this month it will offer laptop and desktop system pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux. Dell has partnered with Canonical to make Ubuntu 7.04 available on select systems for customers desiring an alternative to the Windows operating system on Dell computers. Dell has previously sold enterprise system pre-installed with Red Hat Linux, but the move to sell systems with Ubuntu is in response to many requests from Dell’s customers.

This announcement on Dell’s blog features a video interview with Canonical’s CEO and Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth.

Do you have questions about Ubuntu on Dell computers? Visit the Dell Linux Community Board.

Do you have question about Linux itself? Visit the LinuxQuestions.org Wiki.

I have a lot of inactive PCs in my house. They include several Pentium and Pentium III workstations, a dual-180MHz CPU Pentium Pro server, and even a Winbook 486 laptop (fondly known as “the brick that ate my data”). The oldest in my collection is an 80386 motherboard with 4MB of RAM that I bought “at cost” for $800US back in 1989 (retail was $1200US) from a place called Beaver Computers somewhere in Oregon. My oldest machines, a Heath/Zenith Z-89A (1983), a Radio Shack (Tandy) TRS-80 Model 1 (1984), and a Polo System I (MS-DOS) from Polo Microsystems (my first PC clone, 1985), have sadly long been scraped.

So what does this high-tech nostalgia have to do with Ubuntu? And just what is Ubuntu? Well, you know how each new release on Windows is less likely to work well on older computers? And how you actually have to pay for each copy of Windows that you install? (Wipe that smirk off your face.) Well, unlike Windows XP and Vista, Ubuntu an operating system that happily runs very well on older PC computers–and is completely free.

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