“Hardware support has always been one of the biggest
concerns for the Linux platform. Although Linux supports an
incredibly wide variety of hardware platforms, specific hardware
device support can sometimes be sketchy at best. Linux does
support a wider range of hardware platforms than any other major
operating system to date; however, finding a Linux driver for your
video card or PCMCIA network adapter can be difficult. I have
experienced both the good and the bad of this, and would like to
share a few of my experiences.”
“Video card support under Linux is constantly improving, and now
many video card manufacturers are developing Linux drivers for
their products, or at least working with Open Source projects to
help develop these drivers. The nice thing is that I have never
personally seen a video card that would not work to at least
display to the monitor in character mode; however, the X server is
the bone of contention here. Several months ago I upgraded the
video card in my home system and got a very rude surprise. The
video card, a 3Dfx Banshee-based card by Creative Labs, did not
have any support under Linux at the time. This meant that I could
not run X, which obviously means no windowing environment….”
“Processor support under Linux is phenomenal to say the least.
The number of different processor architectures that Linux supports
is amazing. I recently upgraded from an AMD K6-233 to a much faster
AND K2-III 400. This upgrade also required a system board upgrade.
The amazing part about this process is that as far as Linux was
concerned this was a simple drop in replacement. The system
booted-up without modification and ran flawlessly from the first
boot….”