Problems Linux Enthusiasts Refuse to Address

[David Gerard]

On 5 April 2011 15:08, John McCabe-Dansted <gmatht at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:52 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>> J. Random Hardware on Linux either works perfectly or there's no hope
>> whatsoever, with very little in-between.

> Retry,
> Reboot,
> Reinstall the Latest Mainline Kernel from
>  http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/
> Works for me in at least 50% of cases. Much of the problem I have is
> that Ubuntu is shipping kernels that are older than my hardware.


Are you running Lucid? Then that wouldn't be surprising.

One of the things Red Hat does for RHEL is backport new drivers to old
kernel versions - so you can run RHEL5, but if you're running the
latest version your shiny new server will likely work.

Canonical will need to do something similar for Ubuntu Server to be a
serious contender. Though running in a VM makes life a lot easier for
hardware support, e.g. my work is about to shift all its hosting to
Ubuntu VMs.

I'd expect that the smarter hardware manufacturers would help in such
backporting efforts as well, if they want their server to run those
OSes. This is the bit where working with manufacturers is really
important for Canonical.


- d.