I’ve just spent three days last week trying to get Linux to run on a new HP ProLiant ML 110. It was a pretty awful experience. No distribution seemed to be able to install the Promise FastTrack S150 TX4 SATA RAID controller. First off don’t ever buy a Promise SATA RAID controller, they’re junk. Buy 3Ware instead. The FastTrack controllers don’t do true RAID because they require the CPU and OS to make the RAID happen. Think of it as a device like a WinModem (WinRAID perhaps?). Promise only offered drivers for use with RedHat 9, and no kernel source code options for compiling drivers with other kernels… This pretty much meant that if I ever had to change the kernel at all for any reason, I’d probably break the ability to read the HD.
So I loaded RedHat 9, and was then left with a useless, dated RH9 installation. There were some 30 RPM’s I had to manually download and apply just for security and then after that I still had a dated distribution. Debian’s installer is ugly, but I could have gotten an equivalent install done in half the time. The odd thing I realized during this ordeal is that the majority of the world still supports RH9 as if it were the only Linux out there. HP only offered ML 110 drivers for for RH9 and RH Enterprise Server only, and a lot of other providers of commercial software only provide support for either RH ES or RH9. This got me wondering how did Redhat become the darling of the corporate world? You can’t do anything to it without breaking it. RPM is terrible compared to portage or apt. You have to pay money for up2date (in contrast to Windows Update which is free as in beer). RPM didn’t resolve dependencies automatically, and every time you customized your RPM installed software, you were guaranteed to break something else that depended on it. I could go on forever on why RH stinks, but it still is the dominant Linux out there. All you have to do is look at colocated server and managed hosting providers and they all pretty much offer RH or Windows. Only a few specialty host providers offer anything else. So someone tell me why Redhat?