Desktop Linux: Certified, Not Certifiable
Submitted by srlinuxx on Tue, 10/14/2008 - 18:26.
A lot of hardware vendors are jumping on the Linux bandwagon these days. Some of their pre-installed Linux systems are easier to find than others -- and some you might wish you hadn't found at all.
The problem is that while pre-installed Linux options get a lot more support -- and a lot more marketing -- than ever before, these systems still tend to get lost amidst a vendor's Windows-based offerings. And while it can be tough even to piece together one vendor's desktop Linux lineup, trying to compare products from multiple vendors is truly a frustrating experience.
But finding systems with Linux pre-installed is just half the battle -- and it's not the most important half. There's also the question of just how dedicated a vendor is to ensuring that its Linux systems work out of the box with a particular distro, a specific kernel release, and a unique hardware configuration.
Sure, it's obvious that some solid, up-front hardware support R&D -- especially driver development and testing -- will save vendors a fortune in back-end support costs. Then again, if it's such an obvious point, why do so few of them get it?
Information Week expert must understand hardware ? Drivers ?
Linux had many problems, missing bindings in reusable files is the foremost errors. GCC not up to date on reusable files changed by open source community is next. Then there are drivers on many IBMpc buses, ISA/PCI, AGP, ATA, DDR, etc. These drivers however are not supported by Netbooks. Netbooks only support USB drivers.
And to save themselves any new problems, all netbook manufacturers use older GCC version and use only tested file versions.
Netbooks pretend to serve children and got away with stripped down Linux operating system, and survived on older versions of software that might have less bugs when they launched the Linux project.
In the end, the hardware manufacturers will have to support some customers with Linux installation on their repositories. R$D on Linux is a must. No one can fool customers by new version update with bugs galore.
Beyond Linux survival is, of course, the safe harbour of Microsoft auto-update. Microsoft hardware knowledge has been improving since 1998 with their shadowed bios oversight. They can keep your machine running without failure, as they do on all my computers.
So, Netbooks will move on to do windows. Cost too much to maintain Linux(2% of all markets).