Novell sees lower profit and revenue

[Roger Oberholtzer]

On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 04:21, Net Llama! wrote:
> On 08/29/2005 06:25 PM, Bruce Marshall wrote:
> > On Monday 29 August 2005 05:16 pm, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> >> > I've been installing SLES9 on quite modern hardware with SATA hard
> >> > drives, on-board video and NICs, using autoyast configuration and VNC to
> >> > monitor the installations.  The only thing I've had to do on some
> >> > hardware is to figure out what NIC drivers are required since all our
> >> > installsions are via NFS from a local server.
> >>
> >> Go ahead and try to run SLES9 (x86) (with or without any service packs) on
> >> a dual Opteron system, and see how far you get.
> > 
> > So if we find a piece of hardware that won't work with RH<whatever they call 
> > it),  what will you say?
> > 
> > I'm sure we can......
> 
> If you can find a piece of hardware that doesn't work in RH and has been 
> fixed for months in Linus's kernel, i'll say that RH is sloppy too.

I remember (oh no, here he goes) back in the olden days of this list,
Caldera was applauded for delivering tested things, perhaps a tiny bit
dated, but stable. RH were derided for treating their customers like
guinea pigs because they just tossed out the latest-and-greatest, hoping
for the best. As I wrote earlier, SUSE do now provide kernel-of-the-day.
But you know as well as I that if the newer kernel fixes one thing, it
probably breaks another. And the 2.6 kernel was notorious for that. I
remember the 'my CD won't burn' discussions not so very long back.

Now, as an OS supplier, what am I to do? Stick with the kernel that
works with the hardware claimed to work in that release, or add support
for new hardware, potentially breaking existing hardware support? SUSE
have taken one route (and were earlier applauded here) and RH another.
And isn't that one of the reasons why we all like Linux?

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