20070605 trouble among the hats - plembo/onemoretech GitHub Wiki

title: Trouble among the hats link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/trouble-among-the-hats/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 700 created: 2007/06/05 02:10:00 created_gmt: 2007/06/05 02:10:00 comment_status: open post_name: trouble-among-the-hats status: publish post_type: post

Trouble among the hats

My effort to migrate to Fedora 7 isn’t going well. Apparently the machine I’m running is subject to a bug in the shipping kernel that still hasn’t been fixed.

Under “Common Issues” for this first release under the new community rules, there’s this glaring acknowledgement:

Dell Dual Core Systems
Bug 241249 - Some Dell laptops with Intel dual-core CPUs (Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, Pentium Dual Core) may require the maxcpus=1 option at installation boot time.

Except, from the notes appended to the initial bug report, it’s not just dual core Dell laptops, but also desktops, made within the last 2 years. My Dell E510n, which was made just last year, has a 1.83 GHz Pentium D 820 (Smithfield) and is a pretty generic desktop. In fact, it was built to run an open source O/S — it shipped with FreeDOS.

Wading through all the comments, some of which characteristically include disparaging remarks about the processors involved that are extremely unhelpful from an engineering point of view, I found several proposed workarounds, none of which worked for me.

(Still no acknowledgement of other annoyances, like the latest Adobe Acrobat acroread script failing to work on anything after Red Hat Enterprise 4/Fedora 5)

As a result of all this I decided to rebuild my machine with Fedora 6 instead, which went very smoothly. Of course I’ll keep checking in on bugzilla to see what, if any, progress is made fixing the Dell dual core CPU issue. Ironically, my free copies of the install discs for Ubuntu 7.04 i386 and x86_64 just arrived. Timing is everything. Still, I think I’ll put those Ubuntu disks someplace where I can get to them quickly. Just in case. Being a sysadmin means ALWAYS having a Plan B.