[27087] in Athena Bugs
Re: Installing Athena in the S&P Cluster
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Thu May 31 21:39:34 2007
In-Reply-To: <20070531211359.w7t2usnq6d8gsgkw@webmail.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v752.2)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
Message-Id: <A2370813-F814-4FBE-8CAE-B9531B1A82A2@mit.edu>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
From: William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 21:39:24 -0400
To: Christophe Mandy <newtoni@mit.edu>
X-Spam-Flag: NO
X-Spam-Score: 0.00
Cc: bugs@mit.edu, sp-it-chair@mit.edu
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
When Dell discontinued the Optiplex GX620 that was the recommended
hardware configuration for Athena, we knew we were going to have to
do a fair bit of work to get something working.
In general, you should stay away from the Dimension line if you
intend to run Linux.
The Dimension line keeps prices low by changing the hardware VERY
often to the ABSOLUTE most recent chips available for which there is
RARELY a Linux driver.
The reason why you can't boot the Athena CD is that the newest SATA
disk controller also treats the CD/DVD drive as SATA, not ATPI. This
means that Knoppix 5, SuSE SLED 10, Red Hat 4 earlier than 4.5, none
of them will find the CD after bootup unless you go into the BIOS and
set "Legacy" mode.
The Ethernet chip is sufficiently new and sufficiently obscure, that
it probably will require you to fetch a driver off the net somewhere,
and boot with an additional driver disk.
There's someone on the Athena team who is scheduled to begin work in
July on Athena updates that should get Athena working on the Dell
Optiplex 745. Here again, SATA, Video, and Ethernet were all
updated, but the Optiplex hardware stays the same for a bit longer,
and so is worth going to the trouble of fetching and integrating
device drivers.
If getting Linux working is more important than getting Athena going,
you could try the Ubuntu 6.10 or 7.04 CD. 7.04 has the most recent
drivers, but I've been working a nasty bug in RHEL 5 that also seems
to frequently bite with Ubuntu 7.04: The X server refuses to configure.
I'm sorry that this doesn't work for you now, and that you are facing
the prospect of waiting a long time for something that works. It is
my hope that Dell will soon work more collaboratively with MIT on
getting Linux going. But please note, inasmuch as the IS&T Hardware
recommendations for Dell desktops have focused on the Optiplex line,
you should expect that line to be worked on first and foremost.
-Bill Cattey
----
William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology
W92-176, 617-253-0140, wdc@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/
On May 31, 2007, at 9:13 PM, Christophe Mandy wrote:
> Dear Sirs,
>
> We are trying to install Athena Linux on four new computers in the
> Sidney
> Pacific Graduate dorm cluster. The network card does not seem to be
> recognised
> and we can't boot of a CD created with the athena.iso image (SIPB
> suggested we
> ask you when we called them). The computers don't have floppy
> drives so that's
> not a solution (SIPB tells us that shouldn't matter anyway). Can
> you help us?
> Our network card is an Intel 82566DC gigabit NIC (built into the
> chipset). The
> machines are Dell Dimension 9200s.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Chris and Kevin
> S&P IT Chairs
