Typically enterprise hardware support for Linux is somewhat limited by the fact that, the major hardware vendors only support two or three major enterprise Linux distributions (Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu LTS).
Bdale Garbee, open source and Linux chief technologist at HP (pic left)
wants to change that. Speaking at the LinuxCon conference, Garbee said that HP has now launched a new effort called CommunityLinux.org to help provide support for non-commercial Linux distros.
“It’s a focal point for collaboration on ways to use HP servers and
related products with non-commercial Linux distributions,” Garbee said. “We intentionally set this up for hosting outside of HP so it can be a focal point so
whatever the community wants to do, in terms of capturing best practices
for making non-commercial Linux working well on everyone’s hardware.”
HP is no stranger to supporting non-commercial versions of Linux.
In 2006, HP began providing commercial support options for Debian Linux. Garbee noted that three years later, HP’s support of Debian is still unique in the industry.
It’s a claim that to the best of my knowledge is accurate. Remember of course though that things have changed a bit in the Debian community since 2006. Back then Ubuntu didn’t really exist (Ubuntu is based on Debian).
“One of the things we’ve learned is that all the things we have learned
about participating and collaborating in upstream development projects
has enabled us to have a broader set of distribution support options,”
Garbee said.
