40.63 Dell Precision WorkStation 530 MT (Alpine)

Alpine is a dual processor, high-end server. Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r2 was installed from CD-ROM, 23 November 2001. The network card was not immediately recognised so a 2.2.19 kernel was installed. Alpine was then upgraded to unstable over the internet. The kernel was then upgraded to 2.4.14-686-smp supporting dual processors. A custom kernel was compiled to further support the extra memory through the HIMEM option.

40.63.1 Alpine Specifications

Spec Details
CPU Dual Intell Xeon 1.5GHz
BogoMIPS 2 x 2988
RAM 2GB
Disk FUJITSU MAN3735MP 73GB SCSI
SEAGATE ST373405LW 73 GB SCSI
DVD-ROM LITEON DVD-ROM LTD163
CD-RW NEC CD-RW NR-7800A
NIC 3Com 3c905C-TX
Video nVidia NV15 GL (Quadro2 Pro)
Audio Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) Chipset AC’97

The lspci command gives:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82850 860 (Wombat) 
        Chipset Host Bridge (MCH) (rev 04)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82850 850 (Tehama) 
        Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 04)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82860 860 (Wombat) 
        Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 04)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) 
        Chipset PCI (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) 
        Chipset ISA Bridge (ICH2) (rev 04)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) 
        Chipset IDE U100 (rev 04)
00:1f.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) 
        Chipset USB (Hub A) (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) Chipset SMBus (rev 04)
00:1f.4 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) 
        Chipset USB (Hub B) (rev 04)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) 
        Chipset AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV15 GL 
        (Quadro2 Pro) (rev a4)
02:1f.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82806AA PCI64 Hub PCI Bridge (rev 03)
03:00.0 PIC: Intel Corp. 82806AA PCI64 Hub 
        Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (rev 01)
03:0e.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec 7892P (rev 02)
04:0b.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX 
        [Fast Etherlink] (rev 78)
04:0c.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8020

40.63.2 Alpine Install

There were no particular issues in the install except for the lack of support in the 2.2.18pre21 kernel for the Ethernet card (3c905C-TX) in this machine.

The disk was partitioned into two: one for swap (2GB as /dev/sda2) and the rest for everything else (65GB as /dev/sda1).

The NIC (ethernet card) driver (3c59x) in this release (kernel 2.2.18pre21) does not appear to support the 3Com 3c905C-TX card. The kernel needed to be upgraded to a 2.2.19 kernel on a more recent release (e.g., Debian 3.0 woody beta—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-2.4.14-686-smp was installed without effort (except for initrd addition to lilo, lilo)

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 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.



Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0