Dell Optiplex GX270 (Athens)

GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide
by Graham Williams

Dell Optiplex GX270 (Athens)

Athens (97.1) is a desktop development machine with 1GB of memory and a 120GB SATA hard disk, and a Sound Blaster Live! (Dell) sound card.

An install using the beta4 Debian Installer, booting from CD-ROM, was performed (19 May 2004). Attempt to install a 2.6 kernel (linux26) failed to find the SATA drives. So the standard 2.4 kernel was used. This does support SATA but it identified the drive as an IDE, hence it became /dev/hda. On upgrading to kernel 2.6.6, which the identifies it as a SCSI, fails to boot since it can't find the /dev/hda. This required, after installing kernel-image-2.6.6-1-686-smp, telling grub that for this kernel the root file system is now root=/dev/sda by editting /boot/grub/menu.lst. Also, edit /etc/fstab to mount /dev/sda as /.

Alternatively, the Dell oriented Debian Installer can be used (from http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/LNX/Debian+on+Dell+Servers) to install a 2.4 kernel which identifies the SATA as SCSI. This was then the installation that remained with Athens (97.1).

A further problem was that the BIOS (A03) did not report the right amount of VideoRam (even after setting it to 8MB in the BIOS setup). Consequently X11 could not get a decent resolution. A service call to Dell resulted in a gx270sea.exe BIOS update which fixed the problem. An alternative fix was the 865patch Debian package which provides a software fix to the problem without having to fiddle with the BIOS.

An official BIOS A04 was released and installed, and video memory fix was apparent as was DRI now working. It is also worth noting that Dell have released a project called biosdisk:

$ wget http://linux.dell.com/biosdisk/biosdisk-0.4.tar.gz $ tar zxvf biosdisk-0.4.tar.gz $ cd biosdisk-0.4 $ sudo sh install.sh $ cd ../ Place a floppy disk in the drive $ sudo biosdisk GX270A04.EXE Then reboot your system from the floppy

You can also add a Grub menu item to boot from hard disk, loading the BIOS update!

On upgrading to Kernel 2.6.6 the DVD/CD was not being recognised. The old ide-scsi is now deprecated for cd burning. Needed to add ide-generic and ide-cd to /etc/modules, which can also be done manually with modprobe:

# modprobe ide-generic # modprobe ide-cd

The DVD/CD is then identified as /dev/hdc. To allow general CDROM access the group of this device was changed to cdrom (from disk):

# chgrp cdrom /dev/hdc

The CD can then be mounted, perhaps by an appropriate link:

# ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/cdrom

Use cdrecord to check for the SCSI view of the device:

$ cdrecord -dev=ATA -scanbus

Tools like k3b should also find the appropriate device. For cdrecord the device is specified as in:

$ cdrecord dev=ATA:1,0,0 -data file.iso

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