the dc7700 just don't do linux

[BryanJ]

Would someone who got the sound to work with the DC7700 and Linux using ALSA care to share how they did it? I'm running SuSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 10.1 and I haven't been able to get the sound to work. Other than that, it has been running flawlessly using the acpi settings previously mentioned in this thread.

Thanks,

Bryan

[NancyITadmin]

While investigating the use of Linux on DC7700 desktops I got this response back from presales support indicating that installing / running Linux on dc7700 desktops was not really a problem.

--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Presales_Support
Date: Jan 25, 2007 11:44 AM
Subject: HP
To: Nancy

Dear Nancy

Thank you for contacting Hewlett-Packard and for being a valued HP
customer.

HP offers a number of solutions for our business customers and hopefully
we will be able to fully meet your needs. We do have support for Linux
through our business desktops. We currently do not offer any
pre-configured desktops in the HP Compaq dc7700 line. We do offer a
version with free DOS that will allow you to add Linux without the need
for purchasing Windows when you do not need it.

We do have a direct Linux hotline available to customers such as
yourself. I would recommend contacting our HP Linux Hotline associates
directly at 1-888-HP-LINUX and they will be glad to assist you further.
You can also send them a contact request by filling out a contact
request form at the following web site:

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/328202-0-0-0-121.html

For future purchases you may buy directly from Hewlett-Packard, at the
HP Small & Medium Business Sales Center. You can log on at:

http://www.hp.com/buy/smb

You may also call 1-800-888-9909.

To locate a Hewlett-Packard authorized reseller(s) in your area, please
visit our web site at:

http://hp.via.infonow.net/locator/us_partner/index.jsp

I hope I have thoroughly answered all of your presales questions.
Please reply to this message if we can be of further assistance.

For your convenience, you can also call our Presales Department at
1-800-752-0900 (8:30am - 8:30pm, Mon-Fri, and 10am - 7pm Sat, Eastern
Time). Our Hewlett-Packard representatives are trained professionals
who can help you decide on the right HP product for you.

Once again, thank you for your interest in Hewlett-Packard products. We
value your business!


Sincerely,

David Hoop
Representative
Hewlett-Packard

[NancyITadmin]

Dear Linux friends,

It seems that when I called HP presales back in order to discuss their incorrect statement in above forum posting all of a sudden this forum posting disappeared when I pointed out the reality to them.

As such, I have tried to repost with another account.

Nancy

[NancyITadmin]

As my upper management is angry about the lost time and the still +10 idle machines, I needed to proceed to get things rolling with HP

My latest response from HP, and the first that actually is correct and acknowledges the problems.

May this can help above poster to get the sound working ?

nancy

im Chambers Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 6:04 AM
To: Nancy B
Cc: presales_support@mail.support.hp.com, oslo.helpcustomers@lists.hp.com
Nancy,

You have reached the team who specializes in addressing Linux problems
raised by customers who write to HP. I am a program manager and
experienced software engineer, not a helpdesk responder.

I have been investigating this issue and obtained the following
information from my contact from the dc7700 product group.

When Red Hat releases RHEL 5.0, the dc7700 will not be certified, but
it will install on the machine. There are some visible bugs which you
can work around. These are:

1. RHEL 5.0 will only install if the kernel flag 'acpi=off' is
supplied at boot time (either by the user, or permanently set in
/etc/grub.conf)

2. The accelerated graphics driver from Intel has a serious bug which
causes the display to become unreadable if you switch to a tty.
If this happens, the only remedy is to reboot the machine. If you
change your video driver to vesa, the situation is a bit better
because you can fix the problem simply by bringing the machine
down to runlevel 3 and then back up to runlevel 5. It's best if
you never switch to a standard tty to begin with.

3. Audio plays only out of the front jacks. This should be fixed in
the next version of ALSA (1.0.14rc3) but you would have add that
to the system on your own.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1081719
also has some information about Linux on the dc7700 that you might
find useful. (Try booting with "pci=conf1".)

If I have not addressed your concerns, you can reply to this message
and our Linux team at oslo.helpcustomers@lists.hp.com will make an
effort to assist you. Please understand that because Red Hat will not
be certified on the dc7700, your configuration is not officially
supported by HP. Therefore, we can only make a "best effort" to
help. I regret the imprecision of David's choice of words.

--
tim chambers
program manager
on behalf of the oslo.helpcustomers@lists.hp.com team
hp open source & linux organization (oslo)

[catarina_2]

Hi,

I have the same problem on a fresh DC7700pC with :
- Processeur Intel Core 2 Duo E6300
- Chipset Intel 965Q Express
- LAN Intel 82566DM Gigabit

I understand than Maarten Verwijs said that kernel 'must' be at least '2.6.19' to work on.
He said also "The Knoppix method will work on DC7700 when Knopper releases a knoppix cd with 2.6.19 kernels"
Now, the Knoppix 5.1.1 has kernel 2.6.19.1

Must I use the 'all' method, or it is a simplest way to obtain a basic linux box (any distro) to act as devel server (ie. install Knoppix on HD) ?

I have tried only Centos 4.3 and RHEL 4.0 at this time and search for distro with 2.6.19+ kernel 'in case of ...'; any suggestion ?

Thank

[Gerjan Teselink]

I'm running DC7700 with Linux since December. To be honest it was hell to setup the machine for the first time.

The only difficulty I had was the limitation of only 1Gb RAM. This is solved with bios version 2.09.

I've customized the FreeDOS image and aded the MEFlash program and the DOSFlash program.

If you want to run MEFlash under Freedos you have to run Freedos without himem.sys and emm386.

Currently I run the 2.6.20.1 kernel with ACPI at kernel level disabled.

A basic configurationfile of the 2.6.20.1 kernel is attached.

[Donpicoro]

We were able to install slackware linux on those machines. I post everything as complete as possiblein here:

http://www.gfnun.unal.edu.co/indexX.php?pagina=hpdc7700&idioma=english


hope it helps.

[Xavier Gutierrez_2]

Folks,

I was able to boot the RHEL4 CDROM with the following options:

acpi=off pci=confl nousb

Cheers,

X.-

[Mogens Kjaer]

Fedora 7, test 4, x86_64 seems to work
with the dc7700 without any extra kernel
options.

[dannyb_1]

Hi everybody,
I have at work several machines like this. We tried using RedHat 4 Enterprise with no success. Fedora 6 worked with the already known workarounds like pci=nommconf, but it still had strange problems related to Video Graphic Adapter and Network. We got strange small hiccups if I ran glxgears, but If I have restarted the network daemon it was working correctly.
With Fedora 7 it installed ok, but the problems continues. Same hiccups with Video driver (even if it has the intel proprietary now), but now if I restart the network, the keyboard won't work.
My conclusion is that there are weird conflicts on hardware sharing, and I was not able to fix them. Sometimes unloading the e1000 driver and replacing it with e100 driver seems to work.
With the latest xorg updates from today, I don't have any hiccups in the system, but the graphics adapter still has problems.
We are going to change these machines with something else next week. It's ashame.

[dannyb_1]

After the latest updates from in F7 I don't have any more interrupts when moving the mouse on the screen.
More, I have found a way to make glxgears (opengl applications to run without interruptions).
- service network stop
- rmmod e1000
- modprobe e100
- service network stop

It seems that somehow the e1000 driver is having a conflict with the video adapter. Removing it and using e100 solves the problem.

Good luck

[ionut_lascu]

What kernel version suport hdparm ?

[HPQ HPQ]

Some Linux distributions OpenSUse 10.2 have a problem partitioning hard drive because some dc7700p systems have two hard-drives in RAID configuration. Installation fails. So, do not buy any configuration that has RAID config.

You can go to BIOS and disable RAID and attempt to install Linux on the second hard-drive. OpenSUSE 10.2 partitioning process still fails. The partitioning seems alright, but I think the failure occurs when the file system gets created.

You can install by having only one hard-drive in the entire system. Unplug the Windows hard-drives.

Intel Q965/Q963 driver does not work in Linux. If you only want 1280x1024 configuration in Linux, this is no problem because it uses frame-buffers and not the graphics adapter itself (basically Q965 is useless). You have to buy some other video card to get higher resolutions.

Bottomline: If you want to run Linux, this system not a good choice. There are many other machines or vendors that offer a much smoother solutions for Linux. If you want to dual-boot with Windows, this machine is next to useless. You never know if the future Linux versions will be compatible with the hardware.

Going forward, there will be no more HP system purchases from me for my business if I need to run Linux or dual-boot. For such systems, I am going to a vendor that sells Linux preinstalled (OpenSuse specifically). Certification is not enough. I would like full pre-installation and full business-class support.

[Gerjan Teselink]

A few remarks:

support for hdparm is since the 2.0 kernel.

Then the previous poster. I absolutly don't agree with you about the poor support of OpenSuse with de DC7700. Most software raids work poor in linux (not only driver-support but also performance) Therefor are good alternatives.

I installed at about 20+ DC7700 machines with Linux and I only had to put off ACPI (which I post before).

Kind regards,

Gerjan

[Steven E. Protter]

Well Gerjan,

You might want to share your secrets in detail.

When we contacted HP Israel about Linux and the dc7700 system, their response was to tell us to buy another platform.

The dc7700 has no HP support for running Linux. Nor does Red Hat support his platform.

I reiterate my earlier commentary which is to not use Red Hat or any other Linux on this hardware until HP provides offical support. That is Corporate policy where I work as well.

SEP

[sandraparra]

to install debian etch hpdc7700

installgui acpi=off

[Scotty73]

We have a bundle of these dc7700p machines here running ubuntu.

We've had nothing but problems (slow, glitches, crashes) UNTIL we updated the bios to v2.10.

Just testing now but it is screaming along now. Havent tested sound or anything yet tho.

Regards.

[Marat Radchenko]

I've managed to run Linux on DC7700:
http://slonopotamus.livejournal.com/99744.html

Everything works.

[amx]

Machine: dc7700 with E6600 + 4G/667 + nvidia nvs285 + 2x80G Hard disk.
(don't ask me why I have this setup. If I had a choice I wouldn't touch branded pc's with a 1 mile stick).

I have had this machine for a couple weeks now and successfully installed FC6 on it (initially 2.6.18 and was updated to 2.6.21).
It was working quite happily. A couple of nights ago I shut it down, and the next morning nothing was coming up.
I had disabled the yum updater in case you want to know, so nothing was updated behind .

I have winxp there as well.

A couple of symptoms that I have noticed.
1- After Pressing F9/F10 it takes almost exactly one minute for the menus to appear.
2- When doing memory test the first 3584MB of testing goes relatively quickly, but then suddenly it slows down by around a factor of around ten. But the memory test doesn't report any problems!
3- The diagnostic tool passes all hardware. However, it does not list the two hard disks.
4- When I run the "linux rescue" from the dvd I can actually see all my partitions and have been to run fsck on all of them, and they are clean. I have also rewritten the MBR from grub command line.

I had an online chat with an itrc guy, but it was expectedly fruitless.

Has any one seen a similar problem?

Thanks

[amx]

More info.

After about two or three minutes, the system comes up with the "non-system disk or disk error" and stops there.
It is from here on that I can use my hp diagnostic cd or FC dvd.

[amx]

update:

I reinstalled linux (only as much needed to get a system up). The install went fine, but the problem still persists, i.e. it comes up wih "non-system disk or disk error"

It should now have a fresh MBR, and /boot.

I appreciate any ideas that might shed some light on this.

I probably should mentions that I refreshed the bios at 1.10.

[Steven E. Protter]

amx,

You are not the author of this thread. At least I think not.

You need to write your own question so that if someone provides you a useful answer you can be a good ITRC community member and award points.

Bottom line here has not changed. You CAN NOT use this system effectively with Linux. time to move on.

SEP

[amx]

SEP,

No I am not the author. But I really want to get the problem solved.
This thread seemed like the closest match.

Whether in general dc7700 is having problems with linux, it does not change things.

It would be in everyone's interest to know what is causing it, and how to avoid and even better solve it.

So far the acpi has been identified as a source of the problem, but not in my case.

amx

[Steven E. Protter]

Open your own thread. That is the way it works in ITRC. No help from me at least until you open your own thread. Link this thread in.

As I mentioned this system does not do Linux. You can add your own NIC card and then it will do Linux. No more help from me until you open your own thread.

SEP

[amx]

Update:

The whole problem was caused by a dead hard disk, where the winxp was located. The bios was pretty hopeless in identifying that, so was the hp diagnostic tool.

Everything had to be reinstalled.
I have installed FC6 and did the latest updtes, and it is working well.

So I guess dc7700 CAN do linux.

amx