When in the history of Linux did it matter if a company supported Linux running on their OS. The point of Linux was an OS that because of its open nature could be easily adapted by USERS to the hardware they had, and through their contribution of their personal drivers, could empower other users in the same equipment. That has always been the case. If some hacker dude had your hardware you were lucky. The fact that some very standard hardware items weren't supported early on, while some really freaky stuff was, directly was related to this issue. The fact that NOW big companies lend help in these things, that the marketting power of redhat and such has made it important to release specification on some hardware, that companies who refuse to release such specifications have to produce their own drivers, all is a clear indication that open source and hardware manufacturer support are negligibly relevant to each other. IBM has been very supportive of Linux with their software, and has generally supported standards in hardware that were approachable by hackers, and to a large extent the benefit of linux is the commodity hardware that it runs on. Linux geeks have ported their OS to things that shouldn't even have OS's...

If the machine doesn't boot FreeBSD maybe it requires a special tweak. There have always been wierd things involving bios's and harddrives and such. My Alpha has a bios so distant from the crappy bios on the commodity PC that it is indescribable. In any case I don't think this is a major issue. I think it is as always a hacker challenge.