[TriLUG] Debian on Dell

[Timothy A. Chagnon]

On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 23:44, Faheem Mitha wrote:

> I'm not sure of the best way to go about putting together a machine from
> Dell which has good general Linux support as opposed to Red Hat support.

AFIK, the only thing you have to worry about from Dell or any other OEM
is hardware, and that's all in the kernel anyway so your distro
shouldn't matter.  Unless you mean Dell's telephone support saying "We
don't support that." if you mention you're not using RH, which is an
entirely different matter.

> I've taken a look at Dell's Precision line of workstations, but it looks
> less than ideal. For one things the descriptions are less than specific
> about what hardware is included. I was hoping to somehow actually be able
> to do a significant amount of customization without breaking the bank.

I just got 4 Dell Dimension 2400s for my lab at Wake Tech.  Of course
somewhere in the paperwork they got changed to Celerons instead of P4s. 
That is quite possibly Wake Tech's fault though, not Dell's.

More importantly, the on board NICs that are in them are Broadcom 4401
which doesn't come with the kernel on the RH9 discs.  This meant I
couldn't net install RH9.  The kernel on FC1 install has the b44 module,
though.

So, I would recommend you go with a distro version that has a recent
kernel on the CDs.

Everything else went smooth on them.

-Tim
-- 
Timothy A. Chagnon <tchagnon at nc.rr.com>