It finally happened! For the first time, a major OEM has committed to preloading a Linux desktop. On August 4th, the Lenovo Group, the company that has taken over IBM's Personal Computing Division, made a deal with Novell Inc. to preload SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation.

Until now, you could get preloaded Linux from smaller vendors. Linspire, MEPIS, and Xandros all have arrangements with second and third-tier OEM companies to produce preloaded Linux PCs and laptops. Over the years, some big companies like HP have flirted with offering desktop Linux. For example, in 2004, HP released the Compaq nx5000 laptop with SUSE Linux 9.1 as a "test" launch. Dell also has tried to offer a real Linux desktop, but it's not there yet.

Of course, both HP and Dell will sell you a computer without an operating system, or with FreeDOS and they recommend you a Linux operating system, but that's really not the same thing. So, if you wanted to simply order or pick up at a store a brand-name computer with a brand-name Linux, you were out of luck. But that was then and this is now.

ThinkPad T60p isn't just any laptop. It has a high-end 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor T2500, 512MB of RAM (which can be pushed up to 2GB of memory) and an ATI FireGL V5200 with 256MB of RAM as a graphic card.

"Lenovo's Linux strategy has not changed ... compared to what the IBM Linux-related strategy, related to the PC environment, was," said Marc Godin, Lenovo's VP of marketing for notebooks at Lenovo in a eWEEK interview.

Godin then foreshadowed this day, "We're about to reinforce that strategy and go beyond what IBM or Lenovo, until now, was doing in terms of its commitments to the Linux community … and to our business partners who want to use Linux."

In a way, it's not a surprise at all. Lenovo has been playing second-fiddle to market-leaders Dell and HP for quite some time. Recently, it's been making moves to improve its status as a top-tier player by becoming the first to offer an AMD processor-based desktop to the enterprise.

So, adding Linux to Lenovo's offerings makes perfect sense."

Now that Lenovo made the first step, will other OEMs like HP or Dell follow the path?