Herman Bos open source guerilla

Got spoiled by Linux driver support

Last week I got a bit annoyed that dapper was missing some new drivers, this week I realised its not as bad as it could have been. We got another HP DL145G3 and we decided to try out some alternative operating systems. We tried OpenBSD, no luck, we tried Nexenta alpha6 (OpenSolaris), no luck. Both couldnt see the disks and openbsd also choked out a lot of blue ooze over the screen.

Maybe dapper didn't support the realtime clock thingy on the DL145G3 but at least it installs.

Will there be a new update to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (with a new kernel)?

We use Ubuntu 6.06 LTS/Dapper on practically all the servers we setup and maintain, however in the last months we experienced that more and more new hardware isn't supported.

The latest example is a missing driver for a hardware timer clock thingy on the HP DL145G3 (check peter's blog for more info), which is required for asterisk. Now we have to install Edgy on this server which doesn't suit us really well. Another example is a problem on a desktop machine with the Intel G965 chipset, fixed with Edgy but Dapper would be better.

So I really hope Dapper will get a new kernel, else we'll need another LTS release this summer or we have to start backporting our selves (or find an alternative).

A quick check on IRC said there were no plans for a new kernel version but that missing drivers would (or might?) be backported if bugs are filed. So at least I have something to do when I'm back at the office. But I hope the matter has or gets serious attention to prevent that the LTS release will lose value more and more over time.