Art Wildman said...

|New users frequently expect RHEL/SL/Cent to install without any issues 
|on their new toys, which is very unreasonable for an OS that lags 
|development by 12-18 months. They should be aware of their new hardware 
|compatibility issues, but rarely consult the hardware compatibility 
|lists. IMO, Fedora should be considered for the newest laptops/desktops 
|or consider purchasing a laptop with RHEL preinstalled and 'certified', 
|if they don't want bad experiences getting Linux to work on it.

While I agree with your first sentence above,
Wth rest of it isn't always that straightforward.

We're tied to RHEL3 or equivalent (SL3) by
third party software vendors.  If we don't
use an approved platform, no software support
from said vendors.  And RHEL3 is the only
approved Linux platform in some cases.  It's
certainly the only common denominator among
the vendors.

At the same time, we have to deal with new
hardware.  Just recently, Asus EOL'd the
board we'd been using.  The best choice for
us ended up being a newer variant in that
line, but we're dealing with the Marvell
driver issue (I asked here a while back on
making ISOs because of this).

That said, it's certainly not anyone's fault
at SL that newer hardware doesn'rt have the
we need.  But sometimes there really isn't a
choice.

So the real question is how does the community
deal with these issues.  Sometimes pointing
pepole toward Fedora is the right answer.
But not always.

...
|http://bugzilla.redhat.com/hwcert/

Don't even get me started on RH's list of
hardware, much less their support.

-Miles