Dell and Linux, The Story Continues

Dell was the first big name in the select club of the top computer hardware manufacturers and vendors that took the risk to ship a computer pre loaded with a Linux distribution. The first such machines arrived on the United States market in May and because they proved to be a success, the manufacturing company decided to extend its offerings of Linux machines in the European countries too.

The next step in Dell's plan for the Linux running computers is to make them all support some sort of virtualization technology, making them attractive even for Microsoft die-hard fans that would be able to run their favorite version of Windows inside a software virtual machine, while the underlying operating system is in fact a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, an open source operating system that Dell already uses. According to Kevin Kettler, Dell's chief technical officer, who was cited by the news site News.com the Linux operating system is the key to easier virtualization. "To encourage use of Linux for virtual environments is to make an easier way to do virtual machines," he said.

Despite a recent growth, supported in part by its adoption on some Dell computers, the Linux operating system still lacks the market penetration of its rivals form Microsoft and Apple and the use of Linux based virtualization technologies is seen as the best way to promote it. "What if you created a virtual machine that is an isolated Web-browsing machine?" Kettler asked. "If a machine is dedicated to Web browsing, and you've downloaded something you shouldn't have, you can kill this machine and restart it" without affecting the rest of the virtual machines running on the same system or the host operating system.

It is expected to see Dell computers running this kind of virtualization technologies on sale as early as the next year, according to Kevin Kettler, but at the same time he said that running Apple's operating system inside one of these virtual machines may or may not be supported. Dell is being helped by several other companies, like Vmware, to implement virtualization technologies on its machines. The plan is to either ship the computers with several pre installed and configured virtual machines, or to simply sell PCs that are virtualization-enabled. Dell's quest for virtual machines may be very well aided by the fact that the next generation of CPUs from both AMD and Intel will feature enhanced virtualization support.