Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

About a decade ago, it was often a problem to get hardware to work with Linux. Even if the device in question was somewhat supported, the Linux drivers available for it at the time may not have been of a very high quality. So your options were to wait until other people improved the driver, improve the driver yourself, or acquire different hardware. There were a variety of lists that would indicate how well certain pieces of hardware were supported. But thankfully, things have changed quite significantly since then.

Today I was reading an article about the One Laptop per Child project. It suggested that Linux was not a suitable OS to use on such systems. Now, I don’t know whether that is true or not. I’m more interested in what was said in this portion of the post: Don’t get me wrong - I know that stuffing a full version of Windows or OS X on one of these machines is difficult due to the hardware that’s contained within, but with that said, light embedded versions of these products could have been a possibility, and Steve Jobs even offered OLPC free usage of OS X on the laptop!

Yesterday I wrote about some of the problems with taking an old PC, installing a system like Linux on it, and trying to use it as a file server. That article generated some interesting discussion. Specifically, it is the first comment by a poster named “techiem2″ that I will be responding to.

Most of us have older PCs that we have little use for. Linux advocates often suggest turning such systems into home data servers. A number of people have written how this can be done, with one recent article suggesting the use of Ubuntu.

As we are well aware, the One Laptop per Child project has gotten a lot of publicity lately. And as would be expected, major companies are taking note. Intel’s ClassMatePC is one example of a similar product. I was reading that a version of Mandrive Linux 2007 will come pre-installed on the ClassMatePC systems.