Newham Borough Council has delayed a major desktop roll-out after hitting a barrier in its 10-year strategic relationship with Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s decision last month to sell desktop PCs with Linux installed on them in Australia is giving hope to Linux advocates at the Encompass HP user group that a similar system may be on its way in the U.S.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest PC manufacturer, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs from $AU600 in Australia.

Hewlett-Packard is releasing to the open source community the computer code for a software programming interface that helps manage large data sets in high performance computing environments.

No, HP hasn’t announced plans to pre-install Ubuntu Linux on selected PCs. But the computing giant has scored a deal to provide up to 5,000 Ubuntu PCs to a major university.

HP says a broad range of its computer hardware running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has been examined and certified as compliant under the international Common Criteria product-evaluation program backed by the U.S. government and sometimes required for government technology acquisitions.

Initially, I was skeptical about Dell's decision to sell selected consumer PCs with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.

But after a few days of testing, I'm a skeptic no more. And I'm not alone. Dell insiders tell me that the Ubuntu PCs, introduced in late May, are selling well -- though they decline to share exact sales figures with me.