On 05/08/06 20:41 +0530, Rony wrote:
On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 12:22:53AM +0530, Dinesh Joshi wrote:
huh? i usually use yum to install stuff. for drivers i download the RPMs and install them if they're not provided by yum. Rest other times its generally: ./configure && make && make install for me :). Also, there was something called as sourceinstall. A nice project. Dont knnow what became of it.
There is no time for all this in tight production schedules.
What's a tight production schedule? You build your packages once. Then you build systems with kickstart/fai, and deploy additional packages automagically with cfengine, puppet or bcfg2. Unattended installations work just fine.
Internet is not always available and at high speeds. What would be more penetrative is that Suse or Fedora or all such ones in India set up labs for testing and provide a set of drivers for every new hardware ( mobos and others) that comes into the market. They need not
As soon as the hardware manufacturers provide the specifications. On the other hand, you could be like me and buy supported hardware only. Keep asking for Linux support and you might even find that filtering up to the manufacturer.
give it free. A small charge of Rs. 500/- for the distro and the driver set per mobo can be very attractive compared to Rs. 3700/- for XP home.
Off the top of my head, you would need a team of 8 - 10 people (people do go on vacations, and you do have to provide support) to do this successfully. Even if you setup the lab in India, that comes to an expense of ~ 5 to 10 lakhs/mth. To merely recover this money, you are looking at 1000 to 2000 sales/mth. If specifications are not provided, you can basically double or treble your staff strength just for the reverse engineering issues.
Here's an option: Why don't you setup and run that as a business? After all, you have the freedom to do that.
Devdas Bhagat PS: Corporate Linux vendors have hardware profiles they support. They don't support everything under the sun. Non corporate distros are run by volunteers, and they will work on stuff which interests them. Making them interested in what you want is upto you.
Devdas Bhagat