Re: debian

[Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com>]

On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 00:43, Roberto Sanchez wrote:
>  --- "Joyce, Matthew" <MJoyce@ccia.org.au> escribió: 
> > Clearly it is possible to have comprehensive hardware detection, so
> > presumably somewhere someoene is choosing not to address this issue.
> > 
> > What is the reason debian does not install like other OSs ?
> > 
> > m
> 
> IANADD (I am not a Debian developer), more than likely becuase Debian supports
> IA-32, Motoral 68k, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, Arm, MiPS, HP PA-RISC, IA-64, S390,
> SuperH, the Hurd kernel on i386, NetBSD kernel on i386 and Alpha, and the
> FreeBSD kernel on i386 (http://www.debian.org/ports/).
> 
> That's 12 hardware architectures and 4 OS kernels.  What you are suggesting is
> not easy, which is probably why it is taking so long to accomplish.
> 
> RedHat (and many other distros) support only 1 or 2 hardware architectures,
> thus they have much less to worry about in terms of possible installation
> scenarios and hardware detection.

This is the Nth time I have heard this. Support for multiple
architectures doesn't mean that we can't have hardware detection on
i386. Just take that part out and the other architectures will do as
well. Mostly technical people have to deal with s390s and MIPs boxen
anyways.

P.S. Not to cause people to flame me to death but the proprietary
windows NT 4 ran on alpha, i386, mips and ppc. I hated it, and it
sucked. Also Red Hat and Suse, run on stuff like sparc and s390, I don't
like them either, they suck less. Debian Rocks! It runs on m68k (atari,
amiga) for crying out loud! But it still lacks hardware autodetection on
i386, :(

Bijan