IBM and Windows Vs. Linux

Factual Questions
1

I admit that I might miss a few nuggets of news from time to time. But considering I’m supposedly a computer networking professional, I was amazed at an assertion I heard in a chat room today. A woman, (at least I think she’s a woman) claimed that IBM had announced that they would no longer be pre-loading Windows on their computers, linux would be the only option. This seems like a huge change in the trends of the computer industry to me, and I’d be absolutely amazed, as well as somewhat disturbed that I missed the story. But, after extensive searching on the web, I can find no reference to this. I asked for a cite from her, to which she replied with a lot of hostility and anger. Apparently I’m simply supposed to believe a retired nurse when she dishes out jaw-dropping computer information like this. She’s promised to get me a cite, or a newspaper article or something. But I thought I’d come here and find out if anyone had heard anything about this story.

So, what about it? Has anyone heard of this? Am I the only one who keeps his head in the sand when industry changing events are annoucned? Or did she perhaps misunderstand someone else’s assertion and pass it along as fact?

Help.

2

It is pretty hard to find a cite for something that doesn’t exist isn’t it? It is not true.

3

I was at an ebusiness trade show in Houston last week, and Compaq had a booth set up advertising a new line of servers they are marketing that come pre-loaded with Red Hat Linux. Linux is definitely making headway in the server market, but until it becomes easier for the average user to use, I doubt you will see it as a workstation OS much. Being a free OS, it would certainly save you money as far as buying client licenses goes. BTW, the Mandrake version, IMHO, is only a couple of years away from being as easy as Windows to use.

4

Someone is confusing IBM servers and PCs.
Slashdot covered this IBM announcement a week or two ago.
Unfortunately I can’t seem to get through to them at the moment. I’ll post the link later.

5

Yep. Here we go.
It appears to be a conflation of the announcement that IBM would now offer Linux as a preinstalled option on its mainframes.