[CentOS] CentOS and Dell Support

[Matt Morgan]

On 12/6/05, C.M. Connelly <cmc at math.hmc.edu> wrote:
>
> We run CentOS on our Dell kit (servers, workstations, desktops,
> even some laptops) and haven't had any problems with warranty
> support from them for hardware issues.
>
> I would never call them about software support, which we don't pay
> for.  If I were running RHEL more widely (I do have one install on
> a server), I suspect that Dell would push me toward calling Red
> Hat directly anyway.
>
> Dell has decent Linux support for various distros.  Officially,
> they only support RHEL (and theoretically SuSE), but there's
> community support available for most other reasonably popular
> distros (notably Debian).
>
> Dell's Linux Community Website, <http://linux.dell.com/>, has
> pointers to various resources.  If you want to run anything other
> than RHEL, you can get support from the various mailing lists
> (especially linux-poweredge and linux-precision).
>
> I know that people have gotten Dell's OpenManage (OMSA) stuff
> running on other distros.  I've also had no problems with Dell's
> DKMS and OMSA packages on CentOS (CentOS is, after all, supposed
> to be almost identical to RHEL).  I recently did a bunch of BIOS
> upgrades from the Linux command line with Dell's packages (sans
> OMSA) and they worked well, too.
>
> Also, the x86_64 CentOS code seems to run fine on our Dell
> Precision Workstations with EM64T processors.  The issues there
> are the same you'd see running on any other AMD64 hardware -- some
> packages aren't built for 64-bit systems; some may not be
> buildable.  I can't speak for any great advantages to using the
> 64-bit code; most of the work that's being done on those machines
>
>    Claire

Thanks again to everyone for the helpful responses. Claire--thanks for
those links.