San Francisco (CA) – Lenovo said that it will be offering its Thinkpad notebooks with Linux as well related support for the operating system.

According to an announcement from today, Novell will provide its Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for Lenovo Thinkpad notebooks to commercial and individual customers, beginning in the fourth quarter of this year.

The two companies had made a similar announcement about one year ago, when Suse Linux was available on the Thinkpad T60p for the first time. New this year is an apparent expansion of the availability of a pre-installed Linux in terms of models and availability to different types of buyers as well as a different support model : Lenovo will provide direct support for both the hardware and operating system, while Novell will provide maintenance updates for the operating system directly to Thinkpad notebook customers.

Pricing of the notebooks has not been announced. Last year’s Linux T60p, which is currently not listed on Lenovo’s web site, was almost $1200 more expensive than a comparable Windows version of the device.