Hi,
I have tried for hours to try to figure out why my install is failing. I am using the 11/06 build of Fedora Core 6 and trying to install to a XPS 710 which has the nForce 590 SLI MCP board and has two NVidia 8800GTX cards installed.

NO matter what I try, the installer gets to the point of probing the Video card, even when I tell it to using the noprobe command option for setup, and just after that a clear blue screen appears and the machine appears to freeze.

I have tried many command line options such as "linux text" or "linux text noprobe noapic acpi=off". I have tried connecting a single SATA drive or a single IDE drive. I also disabled every advanced setting in the BIOS.

I still get the same end-result.

Does anyone know what is happening? Can you help me? I really need to get a Linux distro. working soon on this machine.

Thanks!

The dual cards are for dual monitor setup I take it, have you tried installing with one, then integrating the second after?

Or disabling one in the bios.

I went a step beyond that. I disabled all optimization in BIOS. So I was only using a single die of the Kentsfield chip, I disabled virtualization, disabled memory protection - everything possible.

Then I removed both 8800GTX cards and plugged in a Radeon X1900 XTX card I had in another machine.
I have all SATA ports disabled except for the CD Drives which now use SATA. And then I plugged in a single IDE drive to a PATA port.

On the other machine which is also an XPS but an old Gen 5 with a P4 EE CPU, I installed both Solaris and Fedora fine.

So, it looks like this machine has some issue running anything other than Windows, which is not surprising since it came from Dell. And I called Dell Support and got a help center in India to be told they are only trained to support Windows.

Exact same problem occured. So I am about ready to give up and just run Solaris and Fedora through VMWare.
But I am really mad about all the effort to run those OS's natively.

Any more ideas??

(Thanks for your input)
I am hoping someone with an XPS 700 or 710 has had the same issue and can help me!

Pop in a live CD and see what that gets you (knoppix is good at hardware detection).Try to go to cli without starting a xserver if need be and see what you can gather from there.
Or send me the box over - I send it back;big promise :-)

I have your old unit, XPS gen 5 with pentium 650, one gforce 6800, sata HDD. So far Fedora has been keeping me busy keeping it stable. But It's my most used system out of four. Mine came with XP Home which I wiped out right away and put Pro and Media Center on it for Windows, Mandrake 10.2 32 bit and this Fedora 64bit. Surprisingly enough, Mandrake is rock solid on this unit, but it is 32bit.

You may feel a little hard towards Dell but you also have abnormally high end features. I never express my opinion on which is the best Linux to those who ask, but this is the first time I will do so "please keep it low key OK!". The top dog in these woods in my opinion is Fedora's fore father, which is not free. But, it is also more geared towards businesses, not high end gaming & entertainment. So I feel you may have to wait a little bit. I here Slack is geared for power users, but that does'nt mean it has the latest support. Slack 11's kernel version is lower/older than Fedora.

Thanks for the advice. I think I will wait for Fedora Core 7 which should be out around April. For now, I am using Windows but I want to get a Linux testbed up and running for development and testing purposes. I am going to install VMWare 6 Final Release which should be out shortly and then install Fedora Core inside that which I know will work. And I can install both a 64-bit VMWare on Windows and a 64-bit Fedora Core inside the VM. With support for more than 4 GB and multiprocessors, I think that is the best way to go.
What do you think?

For now, probably the best route till someone more knowledgeable with this high end equipment offers suitable tips. I know a little about VMware from what I read but have no experience using it. Did you try crashmeister's suggestion? I would stay away from his/her last suggestion.

I don't undestand what crashmeister is talking about. I am popping in a live CD. I burned a complete set of Fedora Core 6 and I am installing from those CDs. As for going to CLI, again I don't understand. I am using this machine directly. Why and how would I access it through CLI? Doesn't make any sense.

When it doesn't make sense you probably better don't do it

What livecd did you try? Do you know what a livecd is?

Nope. What is a LiveCD?

I just looked up LiveCD. It sounds good. But I need a x64 version.So I think I will wait for a while.

Do you live in India? If yes, buy this month's (Feb 2007)LinuxForU magazine. Its got the latest Knoppix Live DVD. It might help you.