John Summerfield wrote:
As you never know exactly what hardware youīll 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, itīs 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 thereīs always some uncertainty. It is exactly that what bothers me --- for example, Tyan presents some driver software for some distributions and some īgeneral driverī 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 canīt find good answers in my archive, I always can take the chance to ask :)
Thus, Iīm unaffected of the badmouthing you mention --- for one thing, my dislike of Suse comes from personal experience; for another, I donīt trust any commercial distribution because of that experience, be it Red Hat or any other. This may be obviously stupid and not fair, but Iīd be willing to give Red Hat or any other distribution a try --- but then, I wonīt unless a real need for something else than Debain comes up.
Staying with Debian makes things easier for me on the long run, itīs 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
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