discuss: Production use distribution? ---Re: [olug] Linux sysadmin position

[Jeff Hinrichs]

Nick Walter said:
> LSB won't help a bit with the vendors I deal with.
>
> When a telephony hardware vendor tells me they only have drivers for Red
> Hat 7.2, what they mean is:
>
> "We wrote the driver specifically for kernel 2.4.7-10 with Red Hat
> patches. We've never looked at any other kernel version.  We'll never
> ever release the source code to these drivers, and so you'll have to use
> that exact Red Hat kernel because its the only one we promise that our
> binary-only driver module will load into.  If you so much as think about
> using a different kernel we'll refuse to support you even though you
> paid us 25 grand for a year of support.  Have a nice day"

That is why I qualified my statement and said will help with many but not
all.
If you are kernel dependent on a closed source driver then LSB doesn't do
squat for you.  I would expect that when working with niche hardware this
might be more the norm, unfortunately. :(

some day, over the rainbow.....

-Jeff