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Re: [school-discuss] use on Dell

Michael Shigorin wrote: 
On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 12:52:37PM -0500, Michael Dean wrote:

Which distribution will work on Dell desktops and laptops in a
grade school environment.  Only certain Dell servers are
supported by Novell Suse and Redhat, and to my knowledge, due
to the peculiar Dell bios not many distros will  load.


We use Dell desktops and servers. Optiplex series desktops have not been a problem. Poweredge servers have worked well until recently. Current Poweredge 2650's use an adaptec RAID card for which the Linux 2.6 drivers are unstable and slow. Dell servers using Megaraid cards work fine.

On the server side the Dell chipset is screwy, they encapsulate the Intel sensor chips so the standard sensors software doesn't work. The only caveat on the Optiplex clients appears to be with ATI GX300 graphics cards in some newer stations, tweaking the Xorg config file was needed to make dual head work properly.

I haven't tried Linux on any recent Dell laptops.

We have standardized on Mandrake 10.1, download release. We do have a Fedora install running on a Compaq ML5300, and I have also used Debian on some of the Optiplex stations without problems.

- cameron