[ltp] T40 / Pentium M and Linux

[Greg Herlein]

I have an R32 and it's great, and the one time I called in for
tech support they were helpful and when I said I had linux
installed the support engineer said "cool!"  Now, my issue was a
question of some BIOS settings to try to make vmware happy, so
having linux was not an issue.

But, we in the linux community should chill out a bit when it
comes to demands.  Frankly, support call centers are expensive,
and tech support is often a thnakless job that is hard to get
good people for.  

Places that do provide linux support have a challenging
task.  Every damn distro does things differently.  I personally
can't stand Red Hat - I'm a SuSE fan.  I've seen Mandrake, RH,
SuSE, Debian, etc all on this list, all with various kernel
levels.  That variation alone is nearly as bad as the whole Win32
family of variables - that's a lot of different systems to expect
a tech support staff to keep track of.

Now, add the notion that linux folks often compile thier own
kernels and install their own system-level libraries.  Gee, now
how do you support that?  Having tries to support linux drivers
in the past, that gets complicated.  It often boils down to "send
me your .config file and I'll see if I can reproduce your
kernel" - which gets really ugly if the user patched the kernel.

This is why vmware, for example, will only support it if you are
on a certified linux distro.  If you are on your own kernel or
customized system, they can't promise they can help you.

That said, I think that companies need to hear that we *are* a
market for them.  Any time you interact with these companies you
need to tell them that you are a linux user.  Only when the
marketing droids hear it often enough will they suddenly say
"gee, we have to take care of this market."

Greg