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Vivi Griffin wrote: > > I guess that when you have used Linux for a bit, you don't necessarily > expect everything to work first time. I think it depends what you are buying. If you buy preinstalled hardware, I expect everything to work first time, and as far as I can tell this is true for this reviewer except for plugging in his iPod (which wasn't something advertised as working, and wasn't bought with the machine in question). What is depressing is the number of big hardware vendors who seem to see GNU/Linux as an excuse to ship second rate work. HP famously shipped a laptop with a GNU/Linux distro preinstalled without the wireless working ?! DELL shipped us a server preconfigured Redhat 9 where the hardware RAID performance was somewhat less than the performance of software RAID on the same hardware. They did have a patched kernel when we asked, but I think it was pretty sloppy work at the time. Might seem relatively minor but when you buy a rackmount server with a few disks, a CPU, a network card, and hardware RAID, there are only so many devices they need to get working and tested properly! Linksys routers also frequently manage to have bugs not existing the in the stock Linux kernel that some of the models use to use. So Linksys managed to add low level bugs whilst "improving" stuff in their system integration work - argh..... If you are buying preinstall GNU/Linux not only should you expect it all to work, you should expect better value for money (since a lot of it was free (gratis) to the system integrator), and without per box licensing costs. However people should appreciate that good system integration work, dotting i's and crossing t's costs real time and effort, and that you have to pay for that. Microsoft are still in the enviable position of being able to pass much of that cost onto the hardware manufacturers, although this doesn't always result in coherence solutions, as you end up with third party devices with completely weird configuration tools that work differently to the standard ones. Although I noticed a few of these for GNU/Linux appearing recently (although they were all free software so there is hope). > However, what you end up with is > almost always worth the small amount of effort necessary to get > everything working the way that you want it to, especially if it is > someone else's effort - (-:) If you step off on the path of self support, this is often the case, but on the other hand here be dragons! We'll slay them together easily enough I'm sure. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html