Abbie Schubert figured it would be simple: She’d buy a laptop and take an online course to keep up with her college career while working two jobs to make ends meet. But when she accidentally bought a Dell computer loaded with the free Linux operating system instead of Windows, she encountered roadblocks that led her to cancel her class and take the semester off.

This week her story—first reported by her local television station in Madison, Wis.—made her an online celebrity of sorts. More than 130,000 people viewed the station’s story after it was discussed on Slashdot and other popular technology blogs. That drew an immediate response from Dell—and plenty of nasty messages from Linux fans.

I called Ms. Schubert at one of her jobs today, and she took a few minutes’ break to tell her story.

Ms. Schubert said she had never heard of Ubuntu, a popular version of Linux, until she ordered a $1,100 laptop from Dell’s Web site last fall and accidentally chose Linux as the pre-loaded operating system. Once she realized her mistake, she called the company, and a Dell employee told her that Ubuntu would do everything she needed as a college student. So she gave it a try, hoping to take a course at Madison Area Technical College.

But she said that she had been unable to install the proper drivers to connect to her high-speed Internet provider, because she said the drivers on the installation disk were not compatible with Linux. Because she could not connect to the Internet, she decided to cancel her online course—this was last semester—and take the term off.

For the past few months, she said, she has been calling Dell and trying to get the company to give her Windows instead, to no avail. So she contacted her local TV station’s consumer-reports tip line.

The story drew several angry letters from Linux users to the television station, according to the station’s Web site. Several insulted the student’s intelligence, and called the television station biased against Linux and technically inept. “Perhaps it’s for the best that the young lady doesn’t attend college,” said one of the letters to the station, “I don’t think it would be a good fit for her.”

Ms. Schubert told The Chronicle that reading such comments has been frustrating. “I in no way intended to offend people who like the Ubuntu system, it’s just not what I wanted,” she said. “My issue is that I ordered this computer so that I could run with it, but I don’t want to spend more time and money learning how to learn a new operating system. I just think I was treated unfairly by Dell.”

A spokesman for Dell, David Frink, said that Ubuntu is not a default option on any of the company’s laptops, and that customers must go out of their way to select it. He also said that when consumers choose Ubuntu, Dell’s Web site warns them that the product is not Windows. Mr. Frink also said that Ms. Schubert did not call Dell to complain until several months after her purchase, after the 30-day return period had lapsed.

Today two different officials from Dell called Ms. Schubert, and she said she is now confident her issues will be resolved. She plans to take the online course this semester.

Linux fans pointed out, and some of them in kind terms, that Ms. Schubert could indeed have connected to her Internet service provider and run the software she needed to do her college work using the free operating system. Perhaps the take-away point is that it’s not always easy to get the technology needed to take courses online, despite all the hype about how accessible online education can be. —Jeffrey R. Young