Hans Wilmer wrote:
John Summerfield wrote:As you never know exactly what hardware youŽll 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, itŽs always preferable to have hardware that is supported by reasonably recent standard kernels.
NO NO NO NO"Certified to work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux" does not mean it depends on RHEL.
A lot of big purchasers, like you, want to know that the hardware will work with the sofware. Certification costs money which Debian doesn't have.
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 thereŽs always some uncertainty. It is exactly that what bothers me --- for example, Tyan presents some driver software for some distributions and some Žgeneral driverŽ software. But Debian is not mentioned there. So how am I supposed to find out if a particular board will be usable?
Ask the vendor. If the answer is unsatsifactory, seek other products.At worst, building a Debian kernel from RHEL source is not the end ofthe world, and the source is reaidily available to you.
-- Cheers John -- spambait 1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au Tourist pics http://portgeographe.environmentaldisasters.cds.merseine.nu/