A post today by Dell’s Linux Engineering team announcing support for RHEL 5.8 on PowerEdge 12G servers made me stop and think. In the post, they included a link to a list of fixes and enhancements worked in preparing RHEL 5.8 for our new servers. The list was pretty short. But that list doesn’t tell the whole story.

A quick search in Bugzilla for issues which Dell has been involved in since 1999 yields 5420 bugs, 4959 of which are CLOSED, and only 380 of which are still in NEW or ASSIGNED state, many of which look like they’re pretty close to being closed as well. This is a testament to the hard work Dell puts into ensuring Linux “Just Works” on our servers, straight out of the box, with few to no extra driver disks or post-install updates needed to make your server fully functional. You want a working new 12G server? Simply grab the latest RHEL or SLES DVD image and go. Want a different flavor of Linux? Just be sure you’re running a recent upstream kernel – we push updates and fixes there regularly too.

Sure, we could make it harder for you, but why?

Congratulations to the Linux Engineering team for launching 12G PowerEdge with full support baked into Linux! Keep up the good work!