When IBM sold its personal computer division to Chinese PC maker Lenovo, one of the flagship products that went along on that sale was its invaluable ThinkPad notebook line, home of some of the best engineering I've seen in notebook PCs in the entire time they've been on the market. Now Lenovo is preparing to take the ThinkPad a step ahead and ship them with SUSE Linux preinstalled.

Lenovo has announced the Skylight sub-notebook which uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip, runs Linux rather than Windows and will sell for around $499 (£308) when it goes on sale in April. Using the ARM chip architecture, Lenovo's Linux device represents a significant move away form the common Intel/Microsoft Windows model for computers.

I had to read this story Lenovo analyst: Linux on netbooks is doomed" several times because I couldn't quite believe what I was reading. Was this really Lenovo's Worldwide Competitive Analyst saying things like "You have to know how to decompile codes and upload data"? Really?

The VAR Guy runs hot and cold on Lenovo. One minute, he praises Lenovo’s ThinkPad brand. The next, he openly wonders if Lenovo can hold off rivals like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Acer. Plus, Lenovo’s server strategy — particularly as it relates to Linux — is nowhere to be seen.

With Monday’s news that it will bundle Linux on laptops, Lenovo becomes the second major PC maker to offer the open-source operating system on consumer PCs. But though the move is a boost for the OS, analysts say it’ll be years before desktop Linux can seriously threaten proprietary systems like Windows.

Because it's only proper to give credit where it's due, Matt Kohut, Worldwide Competitive Analyst for Lenovo, could be spot on in his prediction that Linux will remain a niche market on netbooks.

Back in June, when I wrote an opinion piece about the enduring competition between the three major operating systems, I assumed the race would just go on indefinitely. But in a brilliant stroke of diplomatic ingenuity, Lenovo brought to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a single hybrid laptop in which Windows 7 and Lenovo's custom form of Linux.

eWEEK’s Channel Labs takes a look at Lenovo’s latest offering in the notebook computer market, a portable with Novell’s SUSE Linux pre-installed.

Recently, many larger OEM system builders have started offering a selection of their models with Linux distributions pre-installed. Really big names such as Dell and Lenovo have offered this service.
Unfortunately, DesktopLinux.com reports that Lenovo have pulled out and will no longer offer Linux pre-installs on any of their home-oriented systems.