40.61 Dell Optiplex GX240 (Cultus)

Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r2 was installed from CD-ROM (22 May 2002). The network card was not recognised and so the kernel was upgraded to 2.4.6 which was available on a CDROM, requiring moving to the use of initrd and resulting lilo configuration changes (see Sections ?? and 40.43.5). This kernel supported the ethernet card so that the installation could be upgraded immediately to unstable. The graphics chip (ATI Rage 128 Pro TF) though was not supported by the current XFree86 (4.1.0). An upgrade to the experimental XFree86 (4.2) fixed that.

40.61.1 Cultus Specifications

Spec Details
CPU Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.70GHz
BogoMIPS 3381
RAM 512MB
Disk MAXTOR 6L040L2, ATA DISK drive 40GB IDE
CD-RW/DVD ATAPI 32X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive
NIC 3Com PCI 3c905C Tornado
Video ATI Rage 128 Pro TF
Audio Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM AC’97 Audio

The lspci command gives:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) 
        Chipset Host Bridge (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) 
        Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA/CA PCI Bridge (rev 12)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 12)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801BA IDE U100 (rev 12)
00:1f.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #1) (rev 12)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM SMBus (rev 12)
00:1f.4 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #2) (rev 12)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM AC'97 
        Audio (rev 12)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 
        Pro Ultra TF
02:0c.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M 
        [Tornado] (rev 78)

40.61.2 Cultus Install Log

The disk was partitioned into two: one for swap (1GB as /dev/hda2) and the rest for everything else (39GB as /dev/hda1).

The ethernet driver (3c59x) in this release (kernel 2.2.18pre21) does not support the 3Com 3c905C-TX card. The kernel needed to be upgraded to a 2.4.6 kernel on a more recent release (e.g., Debian 3.0 woody beta CD-ROM—see Section ?? for details of making a CD-ROM available to apt-get):

  # apt-get install  kernel-image-2.2.19

The networking began working just fine. In moving to the unstable release (after a dist-upgrade) kernel-image-2.4.18-686 was installed without effort (except for initrd addition to lilo, lilo—see Sections ?? and 40.43.5)

Sound card support from the kernel required adding the following line to /etc/modules.conf (by adding it to /etc/modutils/sndconfig then running update-modules:

  alias sound-slot-0 i810_audio

A modprobe can then be used to load the module. Refer to documentation in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/ for details.

To ensure the module is loaded at boot time add i810_audio to /etc/modules.



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