First of all, I am a long time Debian and Ubuntu user and used to be a Debian developer back "in the last century". I am also an IT professional working in a business critical environment with Sun Solaris systems of all sizes. This is just to explain why I might see things a little different than other people.
My personal home system is built from commodity hardware, but it does use mirrored disks for everything: OS, data and swap. Many will argue that mirroring swap is a waste of resources. Well, I have seen swap disks fail and only the swap mirror kept the systems from crashing. Disk failures happen to the best designed systems, and considering that disks are pretty cheap compared to a days work, mirroring swap seems like a good investment. And not just for servers!
This evening I tried the Kubuntu Dapper Flight 6 ISO on said system. It almost exceeded expectations: It correctly recognised three out of four mirrors but failed a the last one. And this simply because it had already recognised the components of the mirrored swap and activated them, so it could not activate the meta device.
Since I refrained from installing Kubuntu over my existing Debian system, I could not check whether the long standing disability of Debian and Ubuntu in providing a suitable Grub setup for mirrored boot disks is still there.
In case any developers are interested, I consider these two issues vital for any production system:
* Fully mirrored disks, including boot and swap
* Redundant boot disk setup allowing booting from both disks
Most Linux distributions, even the so-called Enterprise distributions, make it unnecessarily complex to setup such a system.
There was one other failure: it failed to recognize the Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 card in the system. Since this is an ISA bus card, one might excuse the system for not recognizing it. However it is a PnP card, so automatic detection is possible and should happen unless there is a explicit "does not support ISA devices" policy in place.
If [K]ubuntu wants to aim for excellency, then it should notice that there are two sound cards in the system and should query which one is the preferred one.
Since the DVB-s and DVB-t cards are currently removed from the system I will retest later this week with the cards fitted.
My personal home system is built from commodity hardware, but it does use mirrored disks for everything: OS, data and swap. Many will argue that mirroring swap is a waste of resources. Well, I have seen swap disks fail and only the swap mirror kept the systems from crashing. Disk failures happen to the best designed systems, and considering that disks are pretty cheap compared to a days work, mirroring swap seems like a good investment. And not just for servers!
This evening I tried the Kubuntu Dapper Flight 6 ISO on said system. It almost exceeded expectations: It correctly recognised three out of four mirrors but failed a the last one. And this simply because it had already recognised the components of the mirrored swap and activated them, so it could not activate the meta device.
Since I refrained from installing Kubuntu over my existing Debian system, I could not check whether the long standing disability of Debian and Ubuntu in providing a suitable Grub setup for mirrored boot disks is still there.
In case any developers are interested, I consider these two issues vital for any production system:
* Fully mirrored disks, including boot and swap
* Redundant boot disk setup allowing booting from both disks
Most Linux distributions, even the so-called Enterprise distributions, make it unnecessarily complex to setup such a system.
There was one other failure: it failed to recognize the Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 card in the system. Since this is an ISA bus card, one might excuse the system for not recognizing it. However it is a PnP card, so automatic detection is possible and should happen unless there is a explicit "does not support ISA devices" policy in place.
If [K]ubuntu wants to aim for excellency, then it should notice that there are two sound cards in the system and should query which one is the preferred one.
Since the DVB-s and DVB-t cards are currently removed from the system I will retest later this week with the cards fitted.