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Intel Begins Support for Debian
An anonymous reader writes "An Intel Software Architect announced on the Debian mailing list yesterday that Intel has begun supporting Intel devices on Debian sarge for their extensive reseller channel. This covers the D845, D865 and D915 chipsets and was done to meet customer demand.
They've posted drivers as well as the various distributions supported by the chip maker (Debian, Mandriva, Novell and Red Hat). Looks like the pure open source distributions are finally getting the attention of the big players!"
Open source distros shouldn't need to get the attention of the big players, the big players should make everything to a standard of sorts, so everybody can be 'certified' regardless.
But it's not a perfect world, after all.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
I tried to follow the link given in the summary, but it wanted a login password. Do these drivers come with source, or are they binary only?
OK, maybe this is not exactly on topic, but why is it that Debian gets no respect on /. If there's an article on /. like "Ubuntu Dapper beta-1.0.652 now available for testing" or "Some guy in Australia evaluates ubuntu on his business desktop", it will get put into MAIN. If there is an article about the new graphic debian installer or Intel now supporting Debian with open source drivers, it only goes into the linux section.
/. posts that say "Hey, if you want to run kernel 1.4 in 2005, try Debian." Hello, try debian unstable. Postgresql 8.1 was in debian unstable 1 day after it was released recently. If you're doing development, a bit of instability is fine (and IMHO, unstable is often more stable than ubuntu's official releases). If you want to run a production server, debian stable is hard to beat.
/.!!!
I am now working as a java developer. In the past I've done development , DBA work, and sysadmin work, and whenever I want to get a server working well (or work on some development), my first option is ALWAYS Debian. Sure, right now I'm stuck working on solaris because I have to work with some commercial, binary-apps that do not run on any linux distros. Maybe I will sometimes consider using centos or something like that if I need to work with software that is only supported for RHEL.
But if I have an option, I use Debian. I have a small group of FOSS-enthusiast developer friends. We sort-of met each other arbitrarily, and we subsequently found that we all use Debian. When my cousin in Poland (I'm in the USA) was trying out different *nix distros, he eventually also settled on Debian (before he found out that I use it too).
Commercial distros appeal to newbies with their graphical installers. Ubuntu appeals to newbies who are charmed by the latest gnome apps. Many developers and sysadmins, on the other hand, who have used various distros have discovered that Debian is incredible for getting work done. It has more packages than any distro (I mean, EVERY FOSS tool is in Debian and it just keeps getting better and better -- now parrot, several FOSS java vm's, mono, Postgresql 8.1, mysql 5... are in unstable). When you want to compile from source, building (and customizing) your own deb from a source deb is VERY easy. And when you don't have time to worry about building from source and want to get some software up and running in a hurry, apt and dpkg are AMAZING.
Show me another distro right now that will let me install postgresql 8.1, parrot, mysql 5, mono, and several different FOSS java tools from binary packages in less than 5 minutes. It pisses me off when I read
OK, gentoo is another great community distro and warrants respect for the hard work and quality that the community puts into it. But for me and many other people who truly love to use FOSS tools on every continent in the world in dozens of countries, whenever we consider trying out another distro for a while, we find that we're better off just using Debian.
Debian deserves more respect on