Debian + Dell
Looks as if a bunch of people are having issues moving from the preinstalled Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Debian on their Dell workstations and servers. Maybe I can help. I recently pruchased a $5000 Dell Precision 670n. Fully loaded.
Well after getting my machine, I quickly got ready to make my switch to Debian. I got the latest net install iso from Debian’s website. To my surprise, I ran into a bit of trouble. I was able to get install to go through the first part but after its first reboot, it would always hang on the “Real Time Clock Driver”. I figured it a bug in the 2.6 kernel so I rolled back to woody and I would just compile my own kernel and then upgrade.
Well woody was being a pain to get to work for other issues (bad ISO that I was burning from) so I got anoyed and threw in a copy of Knoppix. I knew my PC already had the core system files installed from the Sarge installer (just hanging on boot), so I figured I had a good starting point.
I went to the console and mounted my harddrives (remembering to give myself read and write access). I then went and ‘chroot‘ed to my new harddrive. I downloaded a copy of the linux kernel from Kernel.org and I untared it into /usr/src/linux. Then all I did was cd to that directory and run “make menuconfig” and went through and checked off everything I need to boot with. When I was done, I saved my .config file and ran “make all“. After building I ran “make install” to install my kernel and then “update-grub” since I was using grub as my boot loader. After rebooting, everything worked perfectly.
After booting up, I recompiled my kernel with new features and stuff and applied the debian patches. Never had an issues. To this day, I still cannot get any Debian binary kernel images to load correctly, even the new releases.
Here are the stats on my new machine if you were wondering…
- 2 3.4 ghz Xeon processors running hyperthreading enabled.
- 2 gigs of ram (EDO DIMM2)
- Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (Dell Edition with the 7.1 surround or something)
- 2 Harddrives
- 72 gb, 10k rpm, SATA
- 400 gb, 7,200 rpm, SATA
- Nvidia Quadro 4 - PCI Express, dual vga/dvi
- 12x DVD+/-RW
- 8 USB 2.0 ports
- 4 Firewire ports (2 mother board, 2 s0und card)
- Intel GigE nic card
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.]
W. Borgert
21 Oct 04 at 2:06 am
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
Horms
3 Nov 04 at 9:17 pm
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.
S. Chen
7 Dec 04 at 5:31 pm
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
phg
22 Jan 05 at 8:41 am
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).
Adam
22 Feb 05 at 6:05 am
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:
hicks
18 Apr 05 at 1:51 pm
hicks: try “knoppix acpi=off” at the knoppix prompt
nyet
20 May 05 at 1:16 pm
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