Inappropriate behaviour of system vendors [LWN.net]

Inappropriate behaviour of system vendors

Posted Jul 21, 2006 23:34 UTC (Fri) by cfischer (subscriber, #3983)
Parent article: OLS: Open source graphics drivers

A particular pain to me has been the behaviour of system vendors. Many times when I get to setup a Linux system for a customer, I am put in front of a system that supposedly "supports Linux", as per the system vendor's definition.

More often than not, this means I can get Linux to run on it only by using a very recent kernel with special patches, binary graphics drivers, and a lot of other twists to the standard installation that are sufficiently time-consuming to more than eat the price advantage.
This even happened some times when I got to order the system myself, since it's not always possible to verify a vendor's claims without a testing machine.

My personal definition of "supports Linux" tends to be, rather harshly, "all necessary drivers are present in the latest Debian stable distribution". While this may be too restrictive for many, I think those measures could help:

A repository of known hardware that has a free driver in the most recent Linux release (kernel or X.org), and that has free specs available set up by an independent Linux authority
A notification campaign to tell system vendors what the customer probably means by asking for a Linux-supported system
Customers asking specifically for linux-supporting hardware with reference to the repository

I am absolutely sure that my customers would, on my direction and that of other Linux consultants, ask for such hardware only, and gladly pay a few dollars more; the cost is more than compensated by the saved setup time.

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