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
--
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Claire Connelly cmc@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Systems Administrator (909) 621-8754
Department of Mathematics Harvey Mudd College
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