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Re: [debian-knoppix] Dell computers

Unfortunately, This large corporation with 200,000+ employees only seems
to buy Dell. I'm trying to move small segments off the influence of
Redmond, Washington.

Now, when the kernel boots, it does complain

Error : only one processor found

Then an obscure PCI conflict error but I don't have that here handy to type in.

The bad part though is its hard to sell Linux if simply putting in a CDROM
is enough to so trash the box that it will not even boot into the BIOS.

This morning, I had to remove the battery from the motherboard to reset the CMOS.
That finally got it running again.

Oh well.
   -Mike

Klaus Knopper wrote:
On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 07:16:53PM -0500, Michael Grenier wrote:
  
I've been running Knoppix 3.2 3-28-03.en version and it seems to run great
everywhere but on the Dell computers which I'm using at work.

When booting from the CDROM, all looks good until it starts the X server.
At that point, the screen goes blank. Now here is what's interesting.....
If I power down and reboot, I can not even get the BIOS screen to come up
on the computer. I have to pull the video card out of the box and use 
the onboard
video to recover. It seems to run OK with the onboard video.

Since the screen goes blank, I do not have a good record of the errors.
It has dies consistently on a couple different versions of the Dell 
Optiplex line. The last one I tested was the older Dell Optiplex GX260 
    
I would recommend not buying any of these machines. There are repeatedly
reported hardware bugs, for example, if you do a software poweroff, the
machine won't start up again unless you unplug it completely for some
time. It is a design flaw in the ram controller that does not recover
from a software poweroff.

As far as I was told, Dell already knows about this error. I don't know
whether they plan to do anything about it or not.

Regards
-Klaus Knopper
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