IT buyers seeking Linux clients are about to get more options after Lenovo and Dell announced plans at this week’s LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.

The big news for business PC buyers was that Lenovo will preload Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (Sled) 10 on ThinkPad notebooks, including the mainstream business T Series. Lenovo will directly support the operating system with Novell providing maintenance updates for users. Units will be available from the fourth quarter.

Although several vendors have offered preloaded Linux on clients, the direct support is a crucial differentiator for businesses.

"The demand and interest in Sled has continued to grow since its introduction last summer," said Brian Green, Novell technical director. " Lenovo will also be providing support for Sled, which distinguishes it from other vendors."

Dell said that it is making two PCs preloaded with the Ubuntu 7.04 OS available in the UK, Germany and France with immediate effect.

Prices and configurations are interesting with the Inspiron 6400n starting from £329 including VAT and delivery for a configuration with Celeron 520 processor, 512MB RAM, 60GB hard drive, combo drive and 15.4-inch screen. For £399 including VAT and delivery, the Inspiron 530n comes with dual-core Pentium E2140, 512MB RAM, 160GB hard drive, Nvidia graphics, DVD rewriter and 19-inch flat screen.

"The configurations may not be analogous with Windows configurations because Vista has different needs for example in memory, but there is a €40-50 price drop in buying Linux [on PCs compared to preloading Windows]," said Dell transactional product manager Adam Griffin.

However, Dell does not have near-term plans for a directly-supported business-oriented Linux PC.

"The announcements come at a time when IT managers are evaluating their PC installed bases in the run up to large-scale corporate renewals we are expecting later this year and into 2008," said IDC senior research analyst Michael Larner.

"The moves would appear to test the water for Linux acceptance and it will be interesting to see the market's acceptance of these models in the coming quarters."
Also at LinuxWorld, IBM announced a data integration package based on blade servers. The Information Server Blade combines BladeCenter HS21 servers with the Information Server data integration software, deployment services and financing for firms addressing the welter of incoming data.

HP said that it will add Linux to its operating systems that qualify to have Pay-Per-Use options on Itanium-based Integrity servers. Under terms of the scheme, buyers can add processors but only pay for periods of high usage.

Projity released its open-source alternative to Microsoft Project, OpenProj, into beta testing. The company is also pursuing an open alternative to the file formats used by the Microsoft tool.