On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 09:03:32PM -0600, day brown wrote:
> Is there a druthers on which Linux installation works best on bleeding
> edge hardware?
>
> Mandrake installed correctly for me, whereas Red Hat never would, a
> fairly common experience.
It would seem Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE are pretty good at recognizing
newer hardware during install.
Those distros by default start up in GUI fashion I believe so being able
to recognize current video and sound hardware has a pretty high priority.
Other distros like Slackware (my fave) and Debian (I believe) use good
old-fashioned character-based installs. After that it's up to the
user to configure their GUI/sound/whatever I suppose.
In Slackware's case it doesn't even come with GUI configuration
tools to detect and setup stuff like soundcards and the like.
Since you're not asking about what's a good distro to get but instead
what works best with the latest hardware it's hard to say.
Maybe waiting for a distro that uses the 2.4 kernels which supports
more hardware.
Otherwise, one of the first three. Red Hat always botches it with
their `x.0' releases. Instead of 7.0 wait for 7.1 or 7.2.
The other reply mentioned Debian, a most excellent distro.
If you want the Debian goodness but with the SuSE/Mandrake/RH-like
tools for configuration and all that maybe a distro based on
Debian might be worth looking at.
Corel Linux is one but I can't say I'd recommend it, even though it's
considered very good for say Windows converts (don't know when's the last
time it's been upgraded though).
The other is Storm Linux, based on Debian but with all the extra junk, er
stuff that the others are known for. Even includes VMWare.
> But, I've heard of Minix, Beos, ...
Neither of the two are Linux. Minix is more like a learning OS(?)
from way back. Sort of the basis for Linux - Linus' Minix. :-)
BeOS is/was supposed to be something of a multimedia OS.
Very slick but it lacks good driver support (shades of OS/2)
and apps.
You can download a Personal Edition that runs/boots from Windows
if you want to give it a see. My soundcard, Ensoniq AudioPCI,
will not work at all with it (lots of other folks too according to
the newsgroups). No way to test out the multimedia-ness of it
without sound. Lots of issues with network cards, too. Linksys in
particular. Ever changing chipsets on same-name hardware. Bah!
The latest kernels of both the 2.2 and 2.4 series support newer
hardware like USB stuff (and 2.2 can support other 2.4 things with
patches) but really if you're going to have bleeding edge hardware
you can't really expect Linux to support it all.
As you probably know some hardware vendors don't/won't release
specs so drivers can be made.
If one already has the hardware and is looking to move to Linux then
it'll be hit and miss. One will find that nifty USB scanner, winprinter,
winmodem, whatever, doesn't work.
If one is planning on buying new hardware then a check can be made
beforehand to see if it's supported.
The Linux Hardware Database is a good place to go to check. Hardware
is categorized along with specs, what drivers exist, pointers,
comments from other users, and ratings.
http://lhd.zdnet.com/
I go through all this and realize this is off-topic.
I don't think `bleeding edge' and SurvPC fit in the same space.
Unless you're talking bleeding edge peripherals that work on
a SurvPC with Linux. :-)
Marc
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