On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, Miles O'Neal wrote:

> 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).

Do you have a Marvell driver that works?

> 
> 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.

If you get some new hardware to work via a kernel module then provide that 
kernel module to SL.  We will include it in contrib to start and move it 
to the release when ready.

-Connie Sieh

 > 
> ...
> |http://bugzilla.redhat.com/hwcert/
> 
> Don't even get me started on RH's list of
> hardware, much less their support.
> 
> -Miles
>