[Beowulf] Repenting for sins against Dell (on good Friday, no less)

[Robert G. Brown]

On Fri, 10 Apr 2009, Kilian CAVALOTTI wrote:

> They do already. Well, except maybe for the dumb-dumb GUI and the
> games. But pretty much all wha'is required to make your servers run
> (including their OpenManage suite, drivers and firmwares) is available
> in RPM repositories. I understand it's not very much advertised, but
> it's there: http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php/Repository

"not very much advertised" = "incredibly self defeating, for a
corporation providing a service".

I'll look there, but as I'm typing this on a Dell M1530 that even as of
Fedora 10 still has non-functional hardware components and marginal
hardware components, forgive me if I'm a bit cynical.  I'll believe that
Dell is properly supporting linux when:

   a) Linux is available as an install for all platforms without paying
the Windows tax and without having to order from a University.  Simple
configurator option, always present;

   b) All hardware in a standard Dell configuration "just works" with at
LEAST a "Dell Linux" installation if not the current
Fedora/Debian/Ubuntu/SuSE, or at the very least works as a standard
install plus a "yum install dellrepo" followed by a "yum install dell".

On the good side, in F10 NEARLY all of the hardware works.  I'm down to
no fingerprint scanner and some sort of problem with the system
microphone (and the fact that the XPS M1530 is scorchingly hot under
normal operating conditions and goes molten when I actually do a
computation or run the Windows VM, so my wrists have perpetual first
degree burns:-) but in the first pass I had no webcam, I had to work on
sound quite a lot, the usual.  Dell could make me happy if they simply
make full linux support a STANDARD, GUARANTEED REQUIREMENT instead of a
six month after you buy it, somewhat painful, process especially for
laptops.

     rgb

>
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Kilian
>

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu