Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask Slashdot: Linux-Friendly Motherboard Manufacturers?

Posted by Soulskill on from the soldering-iron-and-a-chunk-of-silicon dept.

dotancohen writes "I am tasked with building a few Linux machines for a small office. However, many the currently available motherboards seem to be Linux-hostile. For instance, in addition to the whole UEFI issue, my last install was a three-day affair due to the motherboard reporting a Linux-supported ethernet device (the common RTL8168) while it was actually using a GbE Ethernet device that does not work with the legacy drivers and didn't even work with a test Windows 7 install until the driver disk was installed. There are no current hardware compatibility lists for Debian or Ubuntu and I've received from Asus and Gigabyte the expected reply: No official Linux support, install Windows for best experience. I even turned to the two large local computer vendors, asking if they could provide Linux-compatible machines ready to go, but neither of them would be of any help. What globally-available motherboards or motherboard manufacturers can you recommend today?"

1 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. "Flash works fine on 64 bit Linux" - NOT by tlambert · · Score: 1, Troll

    You appear to be unaware of the details of protected content vis-a-vis Flash; I shall try to lay it out for you:

    Protected content sold by Amazon, and also by Google Play, is protected via Adobe Flash Access.

    Adobe Flash Access relies on a unique machine identifier to implement the key escrow in order to lock your content to the download machine so that it can not be re-uploaded in a digital form without having to use the analog hole in order to degrade the content.

    The way it obtains this unique machine identifier is by synthesis of a lot of different machine information via libhal (a library with an associated daemon, intended as a Hardware Abstration Layer). As you can easily see here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal libhal has been deprecated since May of 2008, yet Adobe chose to require it anyway.

    This four-year-out-of-date library is not installed by default on Ubuntu systems, and doesn't give the answers Adobe Flash Access wants in order to be able to successfully run on 64 bit systems. Even when hacked up, there are typically symptoms during video playback, such as the video playing fine up to the first commercial break, and then after the commercial, the audio continues working, but the video is nothing but a black screen.

    These problems do not occur on a 32 bit Linux, as they do on a 64 bit Linux running 32 bit software. The need to support multiple Linux platforms, combines with the Jan 31st 2012 rollout of the new version of Adobe Flash Access protection on content by Amazon no doubt influenced the decision, announced Feb 20 2012, to drop Adobe Flash Support for Linux outside official Google Chrome builds: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google-partnering-for-flash-player-on-linux.html

    Now that you have the context, do my earlier comments on 64bit vs. 32 bit make more sense?