[2617] in Release_7.7_team
Review of HP Linux -- Not ready for our consideration.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Feb 28 11:53:29 2001
Message-ID: <QubGo4Nz0001RALLAI@mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 16:53:24 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: owls@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
CC: nicole_hennessey@hp.com, Sheri_Brodeur@hp.com
As due dilligence in our quest to decide if we'll consider other vendors
than Dell for our Athena renewal this year I checked in on HP's Linux
support web site to see if they ever did fix up their inadequate and
incorrect configuration report.
In fairness, things have improved since I lambasted HP last month.
The single page I complained about did get some orange icons
replacing the green icons.
It's too bad that whoever revised the pages didn't do so in a consistent
manner. The fix required for all four Linux distributions is the same,
but it's categorized under some as an X fix and under others as a Video fix.
Whoever updated the page never bothered to double check the links
to the fix. Some of them end in "page not found". Others end in a
SUPERIOR fix from Intel, that is not documented.
All the certifications I saw were dreadfully out of date. Most had
not been touched since July. RedHat 7.0 is not mentioned at all.
My official advice with regard to HP for the Athena vendor strategy for
desktop systems to be deployed July 1 is:
It is not prudent for MIT to make any significant investment in HP
Linux at this time. HP's committment to Linux still consists of
unverified work by third parties. Quick sanity checks made here at
MIT show the third party work to be of woefully inadequate
timeliness and quality.
Sorry Nicole. HP could still do a LOT better!
-wdc
