Stefan Mileschin

Tin box maker Michael Dell has decided to give the Linux laptop a second chance in the former British colony of Virgina.

Dell has launched Project Sputnik in the US which graduated from Dell's internal incubator program into a real product.

Project lead Barton George has confirmed to TechCrunch that Dell will sell a special "developer edition" of its XPS13 Ultrabook after summer.

Each Ultrabook will come pre-loaded with Ubuntu and will not be allowed to dual boot Windows. If you must have dual booting then you will have to buy the Windows version of the Ultrabook and then install Ubuntu.

George said that the developer version will be the high end configuration of the XPS13, with 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7 processor and a 256GB solid state hard drive. While Dell sells this for $1,499 the Ubuntu version will be a bit cheaper.

Dell dumped Linux in 2010 saying that it was too confusing to average users and was not reaching the right audience. This was only really a problem in the US, as Dell was selling a lot of Ubuntu laptops outside the land of the free where they are not so easily confused.

What differs is that Project Sputnik is more for power users and these tend to know what they are doing.

http://news.techeye.net/software/del...inux-in-the-us