Everything should work out of the box generally speaking. We go through a lot
of trouble to ensure there is proper mainline support for hardware and free
software support.
1. Before we add a product to the catalog we check that the hardware is
supportable (free drivers/firmware) by all distributions.
2. If something doesn't work although is free software compatible and we plan
to use it then we go through and figure out how to fix it so that it does
work out of the box. Again, this is generally speaking.
There are certain situations where something might not work in a particular
situation or with a particular distribution. What matters is it generally
going to work and there isn't much fuss comparatively speaking.
We decided to switch dial-up modems for instance. Different modem same
chipset. A missing ID meant that the modem didn't work "out of the box" even
though the chipset was free software compatible and supported in every
distribution. This is a hardware modem. Now there are a number of
distributions which don't support dial-up at all. So for us to say it works
"out of the box" is a bit misleading. However it does work better than any
other dial-up modem and has psudo "out of the box" support (no driver
installation, compiling, etc required). What is missing in some distributions
is the dialer program. This effects all modems though and not just the modem
we sell for a particular distribution that has this issue. The other issue is
permissions. We document and submit bug reports where we encounter them and
thing things could be fixed/improved. Hopefully Rubén decides for instance
to change the permission in Trisquel 6 so users don't have to adjust the
permissions. He has already added a dialer to 5.5 (at a minimum, which is
better than other distributions).
See some instructions here (other products have similar/better documentation
and with pictures!):
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/penguin-56k-dial-modem-support
