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 -- *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Claire Connelly cmc at math.hmc.edu Systems Administrator (909) 621-8754 Department of Mathematics Harvey Mudd College *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 188 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20051206/e559ff9d/attachment-0005.sig>