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Welcome Lenny, but only on old hardware

Welcome Lenny, but only on old hardware

Posted Feb 16, 2009 9:28 UTC (Mon) by rakoenig (subscriber, #29855)
Parent article: Debian 5.0 released

Working at a PC manufacturer I still face the problem, that Lenny, even if just released is too old for current hardware already. Just 2 examples:

Intel "Boazman" LAN controller (Device ID 8086:10de) is supported from 2.6.27 on and used on most of the actual PC and notebook hardware plattforms.

Intel 5300AGN WLAN will be supported from 2.6.27 on, there is no iwlagen driver for 2.6.26, so current notebooks will fail to support WLAN with the Lenny kernel.

Besides that I enjoy Lenny a lot. But my job forces me to ask about the possibility to get driver updates (or backports) so that *my* customers
can use Debian on the machines my firm is building.

Anyway, thanks to the Debian team for their work. Lenny is a big step forward since Etch was already a bit outdated. :-)

to post comments

Welcome Lenny, but only on old hardware

Posted Feb 16, 2009 16:15 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

That's one of the biggest issues as far as the kernel is concerned is the 'time to market' for new drivers.

For normal distributions it can take upwards to a year for improvements Linux kernel drivers to reach end users.

Welcome Lenny, but only on old hardware

Posted Feb 17, 2009 13:08 UTC (Tue) by sbdep (subscriber, #13282) [Link]

If you really care about getting Lenny to install on your hardware, and require a newer kernel, your best bet is to get the debian-installer sources and build your own debian-installer image with an updated kernel. Then you can have the responsibility to also provide security support for your kernel.

Realistically, it isn't really difficult to create your own installer images in Debian any more.


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