Comments on: Debian + Dell

By: Ariane Biquin

Ariane Biquin — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 11:09:20 +0000

Debian + Dell

Debian + Dell

By: Baumgartner Johann

Baumgartner Johann — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 23:03:45 +0000

Sharing

Debian + Dell

By: Rudolf Willem Bosch

Rudolf Willem Bosch — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 07:31:05 +0000

Skazi

Debian + Dell

By: Gerhart Desirce

Gerhart Desirce — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 17:07:50 +0000

Sarah Connor

Debian + Dell

By: nyet

nyet — Fri, 20 May 2005 19:16:28 +0000

hicks: try “knoppix acpi=off” at the knoppix prompt

By: hicks

hicks — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 19:51:49 +0000

I am also running into a hang on knoppix 3.6 and 3.8 and am wondering how to get my 670 working. Any help like a kernel config would be great…..mine just hangs on INIT:

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 12:05:18 +0000

Note: I just discovered similar problems but a COMPLETELY different cause.

Brand new poweredge SC420 servers from Dell (bought feb 2005) are breaking the sarge installer’s CPU detection routine, and it’s installing K7 kernels (!) instead of i686, so that on reboot the system hangs as soon as it starts the kernel. Happens every time.

You have to run the expert install (which lets you choose your kernel instead of guessing) and manually select i686 instead of k7.

These Dell’s come with 2.53 Ghz Celeron processors; I have no idea what about that is confusing debian’s installer. Trying to log a bug with debian.org on this is so incredibly unfriendly/difficult/time-consuming I’ve given up (god knows what “package” this is, etc).

By: phg

phg — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 14:41:15 +0000

Instead of editing the shell scripts mentioned above you can

mv /sbin/hwclock /sbin/hwclock.bin

and create a shell script /sbin/hwclock containing following lines:
—-
#! /bin/sh
/sbin/hwclock.bin –directisa $*
—-

and

chmod a+x /sbin/hwclock

By: S. Chen

S. Chen — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 23:31:38 +0000

I had this exact problem on a Dimension 4700 with a 3.0GHz HT P4. I found this post as I was floundering trying to configure a kernel which would not need an initrd to boot, and magically was able to solve my problems.

http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2004-November/023021.html

Bottom line is everywhere hwclock gets run, you need to add a –directisa option. I had to edit the following files:
/etc/init.d/hwclock.sh, lines 72, 104, 119
/etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh, lines 62, 75, 77, 80, 82
/usr/sbin/tzsetup, line 148

The last file needs to be edited before you start the initial base system setup the first time you boot into the newly installed Debian system. Now the stock kernels have booted with no problems.

Hope that helps. I will submit this information to the Debian bug tracking system as well.

By: Horms

Horms — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 03:17:59 +0000

As a side comment on hyperthreading. You need to recompile the kernel with p4+SMP. Right now Debian does not supply an image with such a config. This will be resolved post sarge - we don’t want to and any additional flavours this late in the sarge game.

Horms - Debian Kernel Team Member

By: W. Borgert

W. Borgert — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 08:06:40 +0000

The kernel problem is now tracked as bug #277298, see:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=277298
Could you please send your *working* kernel config to
277298@bugs.debian.org? That would help us to solve the
problem.

As you see in the bug report, using the Debian kernel
should work with acpi=off at the command line. No
hyper-threading then, unfortunately.

[Last remark: The "best" way to build a Linux kernel for
Debian is to use kernel-package. That's much cooler than
just doing 'make install' manually, as you can use dpkg
to install (and uninstall!) your self-made kernel.]