[Am-info] Dell's path of least resistance

[Fred A. Miller]

Rom: ROBERT X. CRINGELY(R): "Notes from the Field" InfoWorld.com

Dell's path of least resistance

Last week I lambasted Dell for being in cahoots with
Microsoft because it refused to make its OptiPlex
GX620 systems run Linux (See
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/11/25/021125opcringely.xml
). This week, one of my spies shed a little light on
the situation, and it's even worse than it appeared.
The spy said that the default driver in Linux can't
set the IDE controller in the GX260 to properly use
the DMA (direct memory access). The result is that the
system appears to hang during disk access. The fix is
to install the latest kernel with a special patch for
the GX260 IDE chip set. So, taking the path of least
resistance, Dell simply decided not to support Linux
on that machine.

-- 
Fred A. Miller
Systems Administrator
Cornell Univ. Press Services
fm@cupserv.org, www.cupserv.org