[geeks] IBM RAID Controller and Linux

[nate at portents.com]

>>supported in Ubuntu Server.
>
> Personally, I suggest that you look for another distribution to run.

At work for production server stuff I use Debian, but at home I use
Ubuntu, haven't had too many issues, and not the ones that Geoff
described.

Geoff, you might try checking out your device aliases regarding optical
drives reading discs - I know at one point with Ubuntu (several releases
back) it set up some weird default device aliases and I had to create some
sane ones so things would work normally.

But otherwise Ubuntu has been very stable (even in 24/7 setups at home),
and I've been able to work around most issues I've come across, such as
getting wireless drivers working in 64-bit, setting YUV GPU decode assist,
digital audio out, DVD playback, MIDI, reducing excessive hard drive head
parking in mobile systems, and getting totem-gstreamer to play back WMV
files with synced audio by manually rebuilding the gstreamer codec cache. 
I think the only remaining issues I have left to work on are a kernel
pause on boot due to an ATI SB750 SATA chipset initialization issue and
getting on-board HD3200 video fully working with everything with the ATI
proprietary drivers (including niggly issues like vertical sync).

FYI, I'm now of the opnion that ndiswrapper (an open-source framework for
using Windows networking drivers in linux) can cause hard locks of an
entire system, at least with some hardware/software, so I'd recommend
folks stay away from it if they can at all.

- Nate