Chapter 8.After selecting the 4 candidates and their testing order, it’s time to move to the real deal: an actual computer. The remaining distributions will be judged by their ability to simply install and recognize the hardware. But also how well they use the hardware.

The computer I will use to conduct these tests, is in fact my brand new PC. So no old hardware here, components include a Solid State Disk, several hard disks, dual monitors, a new ATI graphics card,  a Z68 chipset motherboard and 2 network interfaces (one onboard, 1 plugin card). This was one of the reasons I wanted an up-to-date operating system: it has to recognize the hardware.

So there are some real challenges here. Will the Solid State Disk work on full speed, will the distributions be able to use the graphics card to power the two screens, will all feature of the chipset be available and will Linux be able to handle itself when spread over several hard disks? Continue reading »