[Beowulf] Help with NIC

[Mark Hahn]

> I am not sure which version of the kernel is shipped with Fedora, but I
> did not manage to make OpenSuSE 10.1, 64 bits work with Broadcom

egads!  except for pretty exotic cases, there's damned little reason
to ever worry about using a distro kernel.  it's not even that hard 
to hack a distro's install cd/dvd/etc to use a kernel you like better.
in some cases, creating a simple monolithic kernel suited for your 
hardware can bypass issues with a distro/generic/modular kernel...

I typically use the most recent stable-seeming kernel from kernel.org,
and have had good luck with hardware support.  I would be surprised if 
a distro kernel had faster support for new/revised hardware than the 
actual kernel.org tree...

in short: choose distro for nice desktop decoration, but don't feel
limited by their kernel...