Comments on: Dell, you didn’t do right by your Ubuntu customers

By: Wes Mason

Wes Mason — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:56:37 +0000

On this note, they could have just as easily built a bootable linux thumbdrive with the tools necessary to restore the system to the correct drive size. Either put the whole system restore on it or just the necessary bits to script the drive resize. It’s probably cheaper than a USB CD/DVD drive.

Heck, who thinks of including a CD rescue disk for a unit without a CD drive? Fail I say!

–Wes

By: st33med

st33med — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:08:26 +0000

“Joe Schmuck”

Maybe we can turn him into “Joe the Plumber.” ;)

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:29:21 +0000

I was actually thinking more of “Joe Schmuck” than the typical Linux user. It’d be nice to have a product you can tell “Joe Schmuck” to buy without having to worry about bootable USB sticks and GParted. Right now, Dell’s just reinforcing the “Linux is for only geeks” stereotype.

By: Aronzak

Aronzak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:34:01 +0000

Can’t you just install gparted? And do you really have to resize your main partition, can’t you just get another 4/12GB ext3 partition?

“I can’t really think of an easy guaranteed non-destructive way for someone to repartition a drive if they don’t know how to boot off a USB or have an external DVD drive. Even then, a less-tech-savvy user is likely to lose data or do the wrong thing.”

First, getting a bootable USB is far simpler these days. As for partitioning; I wouldn’t have said that it’s that complicated or risky. Are we talking about ext2 or ext3 partitions here?

Personally, I have to give this one to Dell. Joe Schmuck might not be able to do anything, but they have given the smart users a full featured, real desktop Linux distribution. Anybody with half a brain and a walkthrough should be ablt to figure this one out. Couldn’t say the same for Linpus or Xandros.

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:40:43 +0000

Dell is giving customers (that have the needed hardware) an option to fix the problem while working on the “real” solution.

I understand that, but in the meantime those who did not purchase an external drive would just be stuck with 4 GB when they purchased 16 GB. Maybe they should offer to ship a replacement unit and have the other one sent back if they don’t want to give people free external DVD drives.

I can’t really think of an easy guaranteed non-destructive way for someone to repartition a drive if they don’t know how to boot off a USB or have an external DVD drive. Even then, a less-tech-savvy user is likely to lose data or do the wrong thing.

I understand Dell doesn’t want to have to spend extra money if they don’t have to, but it was their screw-up, and they should suffer the consequences in order to provide good customer service and win or keep customer loyalty.

By: cyberdork33

cyberdork33 — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 03:07:47 +0000

Dell is giving customers (that have the needed hardware) an option to fix the problem while working on the “real” solution.

To further the Apple comparison, this is more like Apple announcing the problem with the power supply before they determined / provided a solution, and posting specifics about the problem so that you could fix the issue yourself if you wanted to. Does that mean they will not have a fully acceptable solution in the future?

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:59:47 +0000

You are quite right – phooey on Dell!