Remember Dell’s announcement of the Project Sputnik pilot program a few days ago? Well, it seems that this half a year experiment that Dell has decided to dive headlong into has been captured in a video that you can enjoy above. Basically, Project Sputnik is not about sending a notebook to space for astronauts to update their Facebook status or blog, but rather, this is an exercise to design a notebook that will run open source software aimed at developers. No specific notebook from Dell has been designated as “the Project Sputnik machine”, although Dell did come up with a custom build of the Ubuntu 12.04 Linux software that was specially designed to run on the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook.
Those who are curious can always download the disk image and give it a go, where this particular disk image holds most of the required drivers in order to let Ubuntu run nicely on the Dell XPS 13 without any hiccups. Word has it that there is no support for multitouch gestures on the touchpad, although apart from that, everything else just seem to fit in nicely.