>
> Well my immediate thought is that you may be wise to research
your
> intended platform a little more throughly. Any of the Linux
distros
> will include all the features you require. The source is
readily
> available, and free, as well as any patches and drivers; so you
can
> recompile a custom kernel to your liking at any time. Thus,
there's no
> version of Linux with "best driver support", since any version
can be
> rebuilt or customised to your needs.

By driver support, which distro are companies providing drivers
for. For example, we recently had to change to a new version of
IBM's touch screens. The drivers for the new version had drivers
for windows, mac, and redhat I believe (we ended up using a
different vendor for our touch screens). Are the drivers
"generally" portable across different flavors? Obviously, no one
can answer for sure, but I am just looking for general
experiences.

>A new driver appears, you simply
> compile it in. And no, you don't have to worry about paying
ludicrous
> licencing fees, no matter what a certain dying UNIX vendor may
say ;-)

So if I buy redhat or SuSe, what am I paying for? Is it worth
paying for a big name version or can I just get a freeware
version and live with that? What are the pros and cons of each?

> I think you'll find Linux' hardware support far better, and
more
> stable than SCO UNIX, which has fallen so far behind it's hard
to take
> it seriously.
>
> For vendor support, I'd suggest Redhat or SuSE (IBM use SuSE);
> although it depends upon your in-house expertise. Oracle use RH
on
> their in-house systems, the German govt are going with SuSE.

I have one other question. There is talk that we could sell our
POS system to other companies, are there any issues with the GPL
here? Our whole system is written in house, obviously we
couldn't sell the operating system or any GPL'd drivers, but what
about software that uses those drivers or runs on a GPL'd OS?
Sorry for my ignorance, I have just never delved into these
issues before.

Justin