On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 09:56:21PM +0530, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
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.
Hardware is not the same for long. No one right now has the time to set a system aside and experiment with it. Thats what's expected from the big labs so that no time is spent on experimenting by the production guys.
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.
SOHO segment. Hardware is decided by its popularity and its after sales support.
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.
The big distro companies should be having such labs for better distro sales. Reverse engg. is not the issue, its the gathering of scattered drivers from the net and packaging them into an automated package. I mentioned Rs. 500 in lieu of giving it free.
Here's an option: Why don't you setup and run that as a business? After all, you have the freedom to do that.
I don't have a distro making company.
PS: Corporate Linux vendors have hardware profiles they support. They don't support everything under the sun.
Again SOHO market. Very vast and varying needs.
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.
That will have to change for better linux penetration otherwise windows wins. The SOHO market is not something that can be ignored.
Regards,
Rony.
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