John Summerfield wrote:
As you never know exactly what hardware you´ll get from those vendors, I do see chances for trouble with hardware supported only with other distributions than Debian.Arguably, many of those changes are to provide better compatibility with the hardware. Also, quite a few of those vendor changes make it into the standard kernel.
The problem with buying hardware that depends on a certain distribution is that you can quickly get stuck with the distribution and/or even a very limited choice of kernels. Imho, it´s always preferable to have hardware that is supported by reasonably recent standard kernels.
A question to ask the vendor is what vendor drivers are provided.If none, your chances are pretty good. I know Red Hat does not ship object-code-only (OCO) binaries.
Exactly --- but only if the particular hardware is known to be usable with Linux. Most venders refer to certain distributions only, so there´s always some uncertainty. It is exactly that what bothers me --- for example, Tyan presents some driver software for some distributions and some ´general driver´ software. But Debian is not mentioned there. So how am I supposed to find out if a particular board will be usable?
From my experience with Suse, I do not trust them, neither Red Hat, to be as trouble-free as Debian is.Don't take too much notice of the badmouthing of Red Hat here. I used Red Hat Linux from RHL 3.0.3 through 7.3 (and I still have one 7.3 box) and the reasons I'm using Debian now have nothing to do with its reliability.
Hm, I must admit that I do not read this list very much. Reading is very time consuming, so I subscribed to have kind of an archive I can search through if some particular issue arises, and if I can´t find good answers in my archive, I always can take the chance to ask :)
Thus, I´m unaffected of the badmouthing you mention --- for one thing, my dislike of Suse comes from personal experience; for another, I don´t trust any commercial distribution because of that experience, be it Red Hat or any other. This may be obviously stupid and not fair, but I´d be willing to give Red Hat or any other distribution a try --- but then, I won´t unless a real need for something else than Debain comes up.
Staying with Debian makes things easier for me on the long run, it´s only a bit difficult to find the hardware for it. But it makes keeping the servers running safer because I know Debian better than other distributions --- a quite important thing, imho. Another thing is that standard kernels can be used with Debian; thus, as using hardware that is supported by standard kernels is a good idea, using Debian is also a good idea (besides other reasons) :)
GH -- for i in "*.txt"; do mail -s $i hwilmer < $i; done su: $i: ambiguous redirect