From: black.hole.4.spam{at}gmail.com (Don Hills)

In article , "Rich Gauszka"
 wrote:
>
>I wish that were true.  Unfortunately the pessimist in me sees that by the
>time XP is EOL we'll probably see Linux distros in the hundreds and still no
>clear cut unified installation  method. Finding drivers for various devices
>less than a year old will still suck. Much of this could be eliminated if a
>distro or two shipped with a motherboard and graphics card.

The people with problems are going to be the small businesses with no IT
department who will be buying off-the-shelf consumer boxes with
"chipset du jour". But Adam was talking about big businesses.
They (NZ's Inland Revenue Department, quoted in that news item, qualifies)
do not have problems with hardware support for whatever OS they choose to
run. They go to a big name vendor and pay slightly more for their CDTs than
for generic white boxes, but they get relative stability and a guaranteed
roadmap for chipset life so that they can plan their upgrades. They also
have IT departments who handle the driver combinations for them. Something
I said to Gary Britt here in 2004:

"As for the future, IBM is still updating the OS (new functions, new
device drivers etc) and plans to do so for several more years. Much of the
work is requested by big corporations. As such, device drivers tend to be
for hardware common in CDT (Commercial DeskTop) use but that's not a big
restriction. CDT stuff often has a custom form factor but the chipsets and
implementations tend to be generic."

I was talking about OS/2, but it applies to Linux equally.


--
Don Hills    (dmhills at attglobaldotnet)     Wellington, New Zealand
"New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager,
 preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"
    -- Advertisement on the box for Microsoft Windows 2.11 for 286

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