[27088] in Athena Bugs
Re: Installing Athena in the S&P Cluster
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sidney-Pacific IT Chair)
Thu May 31 21:44:53 2007
Message-ID: <465F7A49.4080004@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 21:45:45 -0400
From: Sidney-Pacific IT Chair <sp-it-chair@mit.edu>
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To: William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
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Cc: Christophe Mandy <newtoni@mit.edu>, bugs@mit.edu
Reply-To: sp-it-chair@mit.edu
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
Hi,
I guess we could have been a bit more clear. We were able to boot the
Athena ISO cd just fine, but it complains that it doesn't recognize our
ethernet card (which is to be expected as you indicated). If we type
"linux dd" at the prompt, it seems to have a hard coded search path to
look to /dev/fd0 for a driver disk. Do you have any pointers for us on
how to:
1. Make it search the cdrom since virtually no one has a floppy anymore
2. Build a cd that may contain the new drivers?
Thanks,
Jiawen
William Cattey wrote:
> 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
>
