You would think that new sales initiatives are introduced at a time like this to pump up sales and make a difference to the bottom line - even if one is using the old saw of "customers want it" to sell the new line of products.

The only logical conclusion I can draw from Dell's half-arsed effort to sell Ubuntu Linux is that it is a trial run, a way of spending the minimum to assess how the market reacts to such an offering.

And the real game will come later - Novell's SUSE Linux on Dell's range of PCs and laptops.

There are a couple of good reasons to draw this conclusion. One, if Dell wants to cosy up to a Linux reseller and not put its relationship with Microsoft under strain, then that reseller has to be Novell.

At the moment, Microsoft can't really bitch about hardware vendors who insist that they want to continue selling Windows XP instead of Vista - simply because the take-up of Vista is so slow. And if these same vendors want to sell additional options on their hardware - because Vista is not proving to be the bonanza which a large number of shills predicted it would be - then Microsoft can't object either.

Of course, you can't put an 800-pound gorilla too much offside - and Dell offered to get into bed with Novell to balance its actions.

Second, Dell would much prefer to deal with a US company rather than an outsider - and, no matter what Mark Shuttleworth's standing is in the tech community, he is an outsider in the US, certainly not one of the "boys."

I doubt he's among Microsoft's league of "friends". In a country where 12 per cent of the 300-odd million people have passports, it's not difficult to figure out why the fact that Canonical is an UK company makes a difference.