Dell and Ubuntu have teamed up to deliver a laptop powered by Linux for the developer market. In reality, it is a bog standard Dell XPS 13 laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 loaded which means that if you already have one, you can get an install image from Ubuntu.

The project is part of Project Sputnik which offers not only full hardware support but also support for developer profiles. This means that a basic Ubuntu install can be configured with predefined developer profiles.

The first ones available are Android, Ruby and Javascript. As Barton George, the project lead, declares, "What I’d like to see is not only a gold-standard configuration, but also a meta-system to manage your developer configuration… The devops revolution is about configuration as code. How cool would it be if my laptop configuration were code that I could store in a source repo somewhere".

Having different profiles for different people or different tasks is not something new. What will be different though is the ability to store those profiles remotely in a repository via a software management tool.

Source : BartonGeorge, Ubuntu