"Back in August 2006, HP made a big stink about
providing full support for the Debian variant of Linux on ProLiant
rack and tower servers and its BladeSystem blade servers, giving
Debian equally billing alongside Red Hat Enterprise Linux and
Novell SUSE Linux. By support, I don't mean testing and
certification for compatibility between the server and the
operating system, but installation and follow-on tech support. HP
had been using Debian internally on its own clusters as well as in
telecommunications and HPC customer engagements since 1995, the
dawning of the commercial Linux age.
"HP's support for Debian distributions on its servers came just
a month after Canonical - arguably the dominant commercial Linux
distro based on Debian code - launched its first server variant,
Ubuntu 7.10. With Ubuntu growing in popularity, you might think
that HP would be inclined - particularly in emerging markets in
Africa and Asia - to enthusiastically support Ubuntu on the server
as its preferred Debian."