The HP desktop galaxy adds a new star desktop OS in a deal with MandrakeSoft.

In the limelight is the HP Compaq Business Desktop d220 Microtower, which will now be available with either Windows or Mandrake's Linux v9.1. The deal, however, extends to the HP Compaq 230, HP Compaq 325, HP Compaq d330 and the HP Compaq d530.So why is HP for the first time publicly offering Linux on commodity desktop PCs? For all those TCO naysayers, it's all about the bundled price.

Buyers in the SMB market are extremely value-conscious when it comes to making IT investments. For PC manufacturers, this is a cutthroat market where margin is everything. Just look at the spotlighted HP Compaq  d220 Microtower system, which has room for three PCI expansion slots, two double data rate (DDR) memory slots and five drive bays. With an Intel Celeron 2GHz processor, 40GB hard drive and 128MB of DDR SDRAM, this system has an estimated US street price of $349. Upgrade the hardware to a 2.4GHz P4 CPU and a 40GB hard drive and the estimated US street price hovers just below $500—$499 to be exact.

For HP the ability to hold those entry-level prices and still offer an OS that does not need an upgrade to provide full disk administration including RAID support (Windows XP Professional vs. Home) is an important advantage. So too is the ability to offer a full office software package via OpenOffice and Evolution at those entry-level prices. That's because the HP Compaq lines of PCs was locked with Dell at the top of the PC vendor market according to a report issued by IDC last week. Dell held the top slot with 17.8 percent and was shadowed by HP at 16.2 percent, which represents some 5,376,000 PCs.

More importantly, Dell lacks any semblance of "street cred" when it comes to a coherent Linux story. Installing Red Hat v9 on a server for an additional $169 is hardly the pinnacle of a Linux strategy. As a result, the deal with MandrakeSoft S. A. gives HP a position in the market for Linux on the desktop.

As a supplier of PCs on the world stage, such as position has far more importance than if HP were just dealing with the US market. While it would be charitable to say that Linux on the desktop is an emerging market in the US, Linux on the desktop in Europe has taken more than a foothold. Dubbed "FLOSS" (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) in parlance of the European Commission, Berlecon Research GmbH conducted a research study last year on the adoption of FLOSS at sites with over 100 employees under the auspices of the International Institute of Infonomics. In Germany, over 43.7% of these sites already ran or were intending to run Open Source software and fully 12% were targeting desktop applications

For this test, we installed the Mandrake distribution of Gnu/Linux on an HP Omnibook 6000, which was powered by an Intel Pentium III CPU clocked at 700 MHz and sported 256MB of PC133 SDRAM. We chose to test Mandrake 9.1 on a laptop rather than a traditional desktop system as a laptop enhanced the complexity of management via the introduction of plug and play PC Cards and wireless networking options.

We began by downloading three CD images in the standard Mandrake distribution from LinuxISO.org. Installation of Mandrake 9.1 is about as painless and as quick as it is physically possible to install an OS. The Mandrake installation is even fast when you make an error and have to restart. In our case, we left a thumbprint on the CD we had burned and had to interrupt and restart the installation. After repeating the necessary installation configuration steps, the installation software recognized the files that had been successfully transferred in our first aborted attempt and immediately marked them as already copied during our second installation attempt.

 This is just one of the many subtle elements of the sophisticated Mandrake installation. Nonetheless, such tight integration and automation can introduce problems when dealing with changes in configuration. Adding to the potential for difficulties, the "feel" decidedly connotes a fixation of always following the best practices to insure tight security. In other words, don't expect to find an easy back door to sneak around a problem when you need one. To test this, we would later reinstall Mandrake and introduce an error in the network configuration. Without such a deliberate effort on our part, the distribution installed properly.

For those who love to live dangerously, Mandrake also has the ability to resize NTFS as well as FAT32 disk partitions during installation. While certainly an interesting feature, far more useful is the presence of all of the major journalized file systems:ReiserFS, XFS, and EXT3. Naturally, Mandrake also supports all of the major network file systems as well: NFS, SMB, and WebDAV. In fact, with the installation of Samba emerges the first hints of a high-security bent to the feel of Mandrake.

Another hint appears when the LinNeighborhood application is installed by default as a Samba client. This is a bit curious given the support for SMB browsing and mounting within both Konqueror and Nautilus. Similarly, Linuxconf is also installed alongside all the Mandrake configuration tools and wizards.

One of the key assumptions of our test scenario was that IT would do most if not all of the configuration and support for the system. It would fall to IT to determine a default, or at least a recommended, desktop environment. The theory behind this being that letting unsuspecting end users loose into the boundless candy shop of Linux desktop configurability would raise havoc with any corporate help desk organization. This assumption proved to play well with Mandrake's configuration tools.

The Mandrake Control Center provides a single location to access all the important hardware and system configuration utilities. Similar to SuSE's YaST Control Center or Microsoft's Administrative Tools, the Mandrake Control Center presents a comprehensive set of highly automated utilities and wizards to graphically configure the system and system services such as Apache, Postfix, and the Shorewall firewall. Just about everything needed for system administration from hardware discovery, performing system backups, and downloading system updates is available through this application.

One of the few unintuitive features within the Control Center is the testing of NICs. Also within the DrakConnect utility is a button labeled "Disconnect." Testing network connections is automatically triggered by first disconnecting and then reconnecting the network.

Such simplicity of configuration is not without a potential cost when it come to a complex reconfiguration problem. To test such a scenario, we really had to work hard at tricking a wizard. For our test scenario, we set out to make a mess of the network configuration. It wasn't easy, but we succeeded by assigning the wrong driver to our wireless LAN card. Discovering what it took to fix the problem that we had introduced turned out to be far more valuable and insightful concerning the security mechanisms employed by Mandrake and their contribution to Mandrake's high-security "feel" than it was about configuring networks.

First off, the sheer simplicity of the network connection wizard now became a liability as we were unable to override the driver choice. To do that we would have to launch a different configuration utility.  It was now clear why LinuxConf was part of the default installation of Mandrake 9.1. At this point we need to stress that we were first and foremost trying to follow a Windows administration regimen: Everything must be able to be done graphically. A distinct part of the TCO flap over Linux vs. Windows is the analyst's chronic lament that running Linux requires some special mystical knowledge to edit configuration files.

We anticipated that once we launched LinuxConf we would be easily able to fix our self-imposed problem. We were right. We were able to easily fix the problem with LinuxConf. Nonetheless, there was still the problem of having to first launch LinuxConf and that's where the lessons began.

Unlike the built-in mechanism to do an su within Mandrake's graphical administration utilities, no such mechanism has been extended to LinuxConf. In order to launch LinuxConf we needed to be logged in as root.

Back at the Mandrake graphical login screen, we finally recognized a significant difference between Mandrake and any other distribution that we have tested: Mandrake does not provide a means to enter an alternate username (i.e. root) from those names that appear in the published list of users. If we wanted to log in as root graphically, we would have to make a very public statement concerning the availability of a root account. Unlike SuSE or Red Hat, we simply couldn't simply enter "root" into an open form and be quietly admonished by KDE or Gnome in private about the dangerous nature of what we were doing. We had just learned our first lesson that Mandrake takes best practices quite seriously—especially when it comes to security.

This lesson was again driven home when we began to test file sharing with Samba. The recent addition of the smb protocol to Konqueror and Nautilus provides a very simple way to navigate to a Samba share: simply enter "smb://servername" to go to that server. Nonetheless, when we attempted to use this mechanism with Mandrake, our networking attempts failed abysmally.