[27089] in Athena Bugs
Fwd: Installing Athena in the S&P Cluster
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Thu May 31 23:01:51 2007
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From: William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 23:01:39 -0400
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I forgot to do Wide reply here. Perhaps someone else can chime in?
-wdc
Begin forwarded message:
> From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
> Date: May 31, 2007 10:51:17 PM EDT
> To: sp-it-chair@mit.edu
> Subject: Re: Installing Athena in the S&P Cluster
>
> Alas, I've never been the one who builds the CD, and I've never had
> to use the dd option.
>
> The Athena install is based on RHEL 3, and so it probably has the
> ancient hard-coded device driver. I've looked at the RHEL-3
> manuals, and it looks like "boot dd" is supposed to use the CD for
> fetching the Driver disk and the "boot driverdisk" is supposed to
> hard code using a diskette. :-(
>
> Perhaps someone else who reads the bugs list can be of assistance.
>
> -Bill
>
> ----
>
> 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 9:45 PM, Sidney-Pacific IT Chair wrote:
>
>> 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
>
