Hi Mayank,
On 09/09/2009 10:56 AM, Mayank wrote:
Hi, Maybe the question has been asked already and I could find one of the [...snip...] I know that's more of a management issue then technical but if there is someway through which I can find compatibility of Debian with different servers provided by various vendors (primarily HP, Dell and IBM) then it would be really helpful for me in decision making.
I don't know about Debian in particular, but in general if any one distro. supports some hardware, it is quite likely that all of them do. Especially since hardware support is (mostly) a kernel issue. Here I am assuming that with support you mean: - The device is recognized by the OS - There is application software that allows you to use the recognized device (device support normally comes into the kernel much before applications capable of making use of the device appear) - The drivers+applications are not proprietary (which implies availability and support only from the vendor).
I tried to install Debian 5.0 on a HCL Infinity Global Line 2700 series server and the installation went hassle free, however when I did lspci -n and tried to verify the compatibility using the web based utility provided at http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl I was surprised to see several hardware components as not being supported. Can I consider the report displayed by http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl as final and dump my idea of installation of Debian
Well, considering what you wrote in your other mail, i think you are barking up the wrong tree ...that page has a very clear disclaimer: """ * This database uses the PCI map of Debian kernel 2.6.30-1-686 . * The result does NOT guarantee your hardware works perfectly. * This database only verifies the PCI devices at this time. X drivers, ISA, USB, IEEE1394 or any other devices are out of the focus. """" So, not only is it kernel version and architecture specific, it tests only PCI devices (not USB, which is what you were looking at) by looking at the PCI Ids.
I would not take that page as a final word, although it might help in filtering out some of your options.
or will the lack of support for some of the drivers won't have much effect on functioning of my system. This is the question which is worrying me the most as of now, because I don't want my servers to hang up in middle of operations at later stage and it would be really nice if someone can help me out on this front.
Lack of support for components that are non-essential to your server operations obviously will not have any effect on the functioning of your system. Even in the worst case scenario, where you might have limited or experimental support for some non-essential hardware, it is easy to disable loading of those specific modules to ensure that they do not affect the system negatively.
Also if possible please let me know how to find which all hardware is supported by a specific kernel. For e.g. I'm using kernel 2.6.22-3-486 and would like to know which all hardware components does it support. If there is someway to find a categorical list of such hardware components then that would be lot more helpful.
I think you are going about it the wrong way. The linux kernel these days has support for the largest number of devices compared to any other OS[1]. So, I would recommend that you first decide on your hardware and that check to see the state of the support (a first step would be to check the various HCL lists[2] and maybe also ask here).
cheers, - steve
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2SED6sewRw [2] https://hardware.redhat.com/ http://www.ubuntuhcl.org/ http://en.opensuse.org/Hardware