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Matt Lee wrote: > > For me, the best response to this is gNewSense - Dell can control the > hardware, so there's really no need to support distributions that ship > non-free software or binary blobs, including any of the ones on the > list or Debian. I'm not shy in asking DELL for formal Debian support, especially in the server lines. DELL do provide pretty good "technical support" for problems running Debian (and unsupported Linux distros), but it is very much a "best effort", rather than something formal. But I don't want "technical support", I want tested kernel configs, and tested software configurations, as they supply for Redhat. But ideally a bit better than they do for Redhat. Supplying hardware for which free drivers exists is probably fine for average desktop levels of reliability (hey I came home to a power cut this evening), where the distros just ship the driver without detailed OEM work. But for server lines I want to do better than I am currently, and that means making sure the driver for the RAID software is tested with the kernel, the firmware revision, the disk drives (and their firmware revisions), and file system semantics, BIOS. Similar issues apply to network cards, which have fun issues these days at the high end with interrupts. Since I don't think DELL will do a good enough job with testing (it is very expensive), the next best is a pre-installed server configs, so that more people are in exactly the same boat, all paddling the same way. So when I ring up DELL they say "this guy called [Wouter|Steve|Neil|Mattl] fixed this by...", and I get a formal feedback loop, rather than hoping someone in #debian knows this hardware....
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