Linux Laptop

[ward at pong.be (Ward Vandewege)]

On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:56:10AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Thursday 04 May 2006 11:05 am, Ward Vandewege wrote:
> > I know you work for HP. Any chance of convincing HP to ship with, say,
> > ralink-based wifi cards?
> >
> > > So far, I have had no problems with the 64-bit driver and ndiswrapper.
> >
> > My colleague will be interested to hear that.
> I work in the Linux Expertise Center in Marlborough. We generally work with 
> servers. The PC division is a totally separate division with the Compaq and 
> HP Pavilion branding. We have a very strong group of Linux people inside of 
> HP. As far as a big company goes, HP is probably very Linux friendly. 

Quite - until this little episode I've been (mostly) happy with HP linux
support. 

The only other sore point for me is the total lack of GPL'd monitoring tools
for HP server hardware. Unless something changed since last time I looked of
course. I tried to explain to someone from HP last year (after linuxworld)
how benificial it would be for HP to have a GPL'd monitoring driver for their
(raid) hardware in the stock kernel, but nothing ever came of that as far as
I know. Anyway, it's a long story - essentially the problem for HP is
multi-distro support - right now it's Red Hat/Suse or bust (unless they added
distros - I was told that Debian is NOT supported, period). 

I suggested that problem could go away if they take a different approach - a
stock kernel GPL'd driver for monitoring the hardware. Then the community
could write plugins for monitoring tools like nagios, and everyone would be
happy. HP would not have to keep maintaining a complex set of software for
monitoring their hardware; all they would need is a HP-based maintainer for
the kernel driver.

Ward.

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