Monday, November 19, 2007
The hardware vendors are to blame
I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks for any new/alternative OS, be it Vista or Linux is driver support by hardware vendors.
My primary server is a Windows 2003 box. The server is running so many open source apps (ssh, squid, tor, popfile) that it no longer made sense to run Windows. So I formatted the OS partition and installed CentOS, everything worked fine except CentOS could not recognise my Promise SX4000 RAID card. Given that this is where ALL my data is located, this was a big problem.
After much Googling, it turns out that the Linux drivers for my RAID card are closed source, not compatible with the 2.4 kernel and only support a few flavours of Linux. I can understand the hardware vendor not supporting newer versions of Linux but how about releasing the source to the driver? It seems that the hardware vendors are still a handbrake to alternate OS adoption.
My primary server is a Windows 2003 box. The server is running so many open source apps (ssh, squid, tor, popfile) that it no longer made sense to run Windows. So I formatted the OS partition and installed CentOS, everything worked fine except CentOS could not recognise my Promise SX4000 RAID card. Given that this is where ALL my data is located, this was a big problem.
After much Googling, it turns out that the Linux drivers for my RAID card are closed source, not compatible with the 2.4 kernel and only support a few flavours of Linux. I can understand the hardware vendor not supporting newer versions of Linux but how about releasing the source to the driver? It seems that the hardware vendors are still a handbrake to alternate OS adoption.
