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Linux Distro for ABIT Hardware

Posted by Hemos on from the a-distro-for-everything dept.

roidrage writes, "It had to happen sooner or later: Linux distributions tailored for specific pieces of hardware. ABIT has announced "Gentus Linux". It's a distribution preconfigured to support Ultra DMA/66 on ABIT mobos. Now if only Creative would come out with SBLive Linux. " I'm going to be introducing a number of new distros: Pre-Coffee Distro as well as Drunken-Sysadmining Distro. Seriously, though, this is an interesting step. Are more and more folks going to issue distributions like this? What do you think?

8 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. too many. by quadra · · Score: 3

    All these distros make FreeBSD look more and more appealing to me. It's certainly not a bad thing to have more choices, but it may seriously hurt the ability of admins and helpdesk people out there to effectively support linux.

    1. Re:too many. by generic-man · · Score: 3

      All these distros make Windows look more and more appealing to me. It's certainly not a bad thing to have more choices, but it may seriously hurt the ability of admins and helpdesk people out theree to effectivly support linux.

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  2. What it really is.. by Tom+Rini · · Score: 3

    A friend of mine pointed this out this morning. It's RedHat 6.x with s/RedHat/Gentus/g and Andre Hedricks(sp?)s IDE patches applied to a 2.2.x kernel. I'm not sure about the kernel part, but those patches do add support for the UDMA/66 chipset found in the BP6. As for the 1st statement check out:
    http://www.gentus.com/qig-images/image002.jpg
    and
    http://www.gentus.com/qig-images/image030.jpg

  3. they just don't get it ;-( by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 3
    the answer is hardware incompatibilities is not to just roll your own distro - its to work with the kernel developers to ensure your hardware is supported in the main line

    sheesh! this is madness. its enough to make me run to freebsd - with only onedistro. I can only assume things are more sane there. limited - to some degree - but saner, for sure.

    fragmenting the linux base can only have detrimental effects in the long run. if the linux distro market becomes so splintered, the anti-linux crowd will see this as a sign of disorder (disorganization) and we'll lose more credibility than we already have.

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    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  4. Tuning is what is needed, no new distros. by Bryan+Andersen · · Score: 3

    Tuning a distro for a specific machine is what needs to be done. Start from one of the main distributions then tune it to your hardware offering. When you ship a Linux/*BSD distro with your system, ship a tuned version for the hardware shipped. Making a new distro is way overkill. It may even be counter productive.

  5. Hardware Specific distros by DaveHowe · · Score: 3

    I don't really think this is a major issue - it appears to be a pretty standard RedHat distro, with the correct hardware setup already made; OEM copies of Windows (in particular, the HP varient that doesn't even HAVE a real install disk, just a flashable image) have been doing this for years in the Microsoft world, without people saying it is going to splinter Windows and end the Windows dream.....
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  6. Maybe its not so bad... by ripler · · Score: 5

    OK, at first I said "What are they thinking?!?"

    I thought, why don't they just make some RPMs since their ripping RedHat. That would keep it simple.

    Then I read their snazzy little explanation. I have an ABIT BP6 board, and I have managed to get everything working on several distributions. The only problem is that with any normal distribution, you have no initial support for the DMA/66 controller. So, if you have a system with one drive and you want to use the faster controller, you have to install it with the drive on the DMA/33 controller, and then move it to the DMA/66 controller after installing and tweaking.

    The first time I had to go through all that, it was a challenge. I had fun. Although, I'm not sure most people would agree. The second time, I didn't bother. I just bought more drives, and installed to the DMA/33 controller. I tweaked some things and put my more demanding partitions on the new drives (DMA/66).

    I like to use a different distro every few months just to keep a finger on the pulse of how linux is changing. I sure wouldn't enjoy doing an install to that machine so often if I only had one drive.

    This is not an issue of making sure something is supported in the kernel. It is supported with kernel patches, and can be with any distro. Too bad no distro thinks to put support in to their install. This must be a job for Gentus' (or whatever that name was).

    So before you guys go off slamming this, read a little of the BP6 pseudo howto and the docs to install a distro on the DMA/66 controller. Most folks wouldn't bother, and therefore wouldn't get the full benefit of the hardware they paid for.

    TheRipler

    Any grammatical errors are purely intentional.

  7. No HPT366 + DVD by heroine · · Score: 3

    Yes, you can get HPT366 on the BP6. You can also get DVD on it. But forget about HPT366 and DVD in the same kernel. They just won't compile together.