title: 64-bit CentOS on Dell Optiplex GX-620 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/64-bit-centos-on-dell-optiplex-gx-620/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 526 created: 2008/05/21 21:36:51 created_gmt: 2008/05/21 21:36:51 comment_status: open post_name: 64-bit-centos-on-dell-optiplex-gx-620 status: publish post_type: post

64-bit CentOS on Dell Optiplex GX-620

Of course this graphic is not quite technically accurate — the Optiplex GX-620 comes with an Intel, not an AMD, processor. But, as I’m sure Intel is reminded every day, x86_64 technology was invented and championed by AMD while Intel was still captive to it’s “our way or the highway” (a/k/a “backwards compatible over our dead body”) 64-bit pure Itanium campaign.

Our Dell Optiplex GX-620’s at work come with the Intel Pentium 4 “Prescott” processor, so they’re single core only. With hyperthreading turned on the O/S thinks it’s a 2 CPU machine, which can sometimes lead to trouble, but shouldn’t be a major issue. Their hard drives are SATA, which was a problem for the shipping IDE driver under the initial release of RHEL 4, but has been cleared up in later respins of that version and in RHEL 5. My machine has been patched up to the latest firmware level and packed with 4 Gb RAM from Kingston.

I had tried installing CentOS 4 x86_64 some time ago with no luck. I decided to give it another try, this time with CentOS 5.1, after one of my colleagues was able to install straight from the respin CD without any fuss.

Of course I wasn’t so lucky. Basic problem turned out to be that I needed to Enable the Execute Disable feature (also known at the “NX” bit in AMD processors) in the BIOS. Apparently gdm issues a call when you try logging out of the desktop that triggers a kernel panic. Who woulda thunk. Also still have to remove “/rhgb quiet” from the grub.conf line that loads the kernel to avoid crashing the X server. Going to investigate that further to see if I can avoid that. Maybe do some more experimentation tommorrow.

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