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A month ago the company announced that it would extend its Linux offering in response to feedback to its IdeaStorm website and a subsequent survey. In this, more than 70 per cent of the 100,000 respondents said that they would use the open source operating system both at home and at work.

Ubuntu was the most requested distro and version 7.0.4 will be available as an option on selected Dell consumer models in the US in the coming weeks. The company has yet to reveal whether it will offer Linux machines outside its home country, nor whether the machines would also include Windows. Dell declined to say.

The choice of Ubuntu is not entirely surprising given Michael Dell's enthusiasm; according to his biography on the company website, he runs the distro at home on his Precision M90 laptop.

Dell will continue to deploy both Red Hat and Novell/SUSE versions of Linux on

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PowerEdge servers and Precision workstations, while OptiPlex desktops and Latitude notebooks are certified to run Novell SLED 10. It has also updated its policy on driver support of new Linux desktop and notebook products to use open source drivers in kernel.org where possible.

Jane Silber, director of operations at Canonical, Ubuntu's distributor, said that she expects the number of Ubuntu users to increase as a result of Dell's announcement, not least because this is the first time that the distro will be pre-installed on a major PC maker's hardware.

'There are a class of users who want a system pre-installed,' she said. 'A lot of people use Microsoft's Windows because that's what the computer comes with. The mere fact that Ubuntu's available out of the box will increase adoption.'

She added that she expects Dell's commitment to persuade more device makers to open the source code for their drivers so that Ubuntu and other Linux flavours can provide support for as wide a selection of peripherals as Windows.

Canonical's founder expands on this and other Linux issues in a video on the Direct2Dell blog.

As well as committing itself to fully supporting hardware sold with Linux, Dell that recently opened a Linux forum and distributes a number of Linux mailing lists.