I2O on Linux

It seems with each passing day I become more and more frustrated with Debian Linux. I totally understand its appeal – if you have no clue about software configuration/installation apt-get makes things extremely easy. But why on earth does the system have to so extremely customize the installation paths that there is no way to install software outside of the Debian way? Argh!
Side rant aside – last week was the battle to get an Adaptec RAID controller working under Debian. Again don’t know what the problem was when the Debian kernel was created – this just works under RHEL (I’d really started taking the RH installer for granted – man is it nice), after what seemed like days we finally managed to get this to work. If you ever come across this, this site helped:
I2O on Linux