Installing Linux on Dell Poweredge - help me help myself!
 

I just got a Dell Poweredge and want to install Linux on it. What I would appreciate is if someone could point me in the right direction.
I tried booting from CD with the ubuntu server iso in the drive but nothing.
Any help on how to best go about this would be greatly appreciated. Please excuse the newb factor - I really am wanting to figure this out but just need a nudge in the right direction.
- best Linux OS to use?
- best way to install?

any pitfalls?

Thanks in advance!

"but nothing" is too uninformative. You will need to elaborate on that - error message? no GUI? what is the problem?

From personal expereince, I can say that every distro is differently able to handle hardware issues. Usually if the distro you are using is having issues in dealing with the hardware, try another distro. And Ubuntu is NOT the most apt noob distro., inspite of its popularity I recommend PCLinux, Mandriva and Opensuse in that order.

The most common issue would be no GUI, in which case the issue is that the proper gfx drivers are not available in the distro. You can try a different distro to see if it can handle the gfx better. Being a relative noob myself, I can tell you that changing the driver to "vesa" helps, but I am not sure how to do it Ubuntu. (every distro differs in basic commands as well).
I have also faced a problem of almost every distro crashing (belenix based on Opensolaris was the only one that would successfully boot), which was rectified by adding "all generic ide" to the boot command.

Did any boot happen or was that the problem? If it didn't boot, how did you burn the CD?

Be bold, and take the initiative. Check out the info provided by Dell for Linux on Dell Poweredge servers...

http://linux.dell.com/distributions.shtml

http://linux.dell.com/debian_9g.shtml

http://linux.dell.com/storage.shtml

Info on installing, supported Distros/Server builds, etc, can all be found on those pages.

Much thanks for your replies - this is honestly my first ever foray into this world so I appreciate the gentle nature (so far) - and of course, I should have been more specific. I don't believe the server is recognizing the CD - I get to the F1 to retry or F2 for setup. It says "boot file not found" or something to that effect. I burned the disc from Ubuntu's website for server - intel. I burned it on a Windows PC. At this point I can't get out of the basic F2 setup -
Billymayday - no boot happened at all.
farslayer - Thank you! That will definitely be helpful. I will dive into these sites and hopefully make some progress - I'm sure I'll be back - thanks again!

How did you burn the CD, would be the question then...

You would have downloaded an .iso image of the CD from the Ubuntu site. when you burn it you need to write the .iso image to Disk, not burn it as a data file onto the CD. if you insert the CD into a regular PC and look at the contents of hte disk and you see a single filename.iso then the disk was burned incorrectly.

Start with making sure you burned the ISO image to disc properly. there are instructions on this site to help you accomplish this task successfully.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/LQ_ISO

you also need to make sure that CDROM is selected as a boot device in the BIOS setup for the Machine. Dell Desktop PC's have a F10 Option for a boot menu so you can select a specific device during boot. All my Dell servers are in production and don't get rebooted very often so I can't recall if they also have this boot menu at startup or not.

Right on - I will burn new discs and give it another shot. I am planning on burning for Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 - I see Fedora requires 7 CDs while Ubuntu only one - any reason you know of to go with Fedora instead?

the Current Ubuntu 8.04 is a Long term release and will be supported for 5 Years I believe..
I'm a Debian fan, and Ubuntu is based off Debian, and is a good choice for new users.. Also since you are installing this on a Server Ubuntu has a Server version Fedora Does not.

Redhats Server version would be Redhat Enterprise Linux, and a free knockoff of that enterprise version is called CentOS. If you wanted to try Redhat on your serer I would recommend using CentOS.

There is no reason you couldn't partition the drive and install BOTH versions of Linux on your server to see which you like better.

or

You could install one version then install vmware and try the other version out in a Virtual Machine.

Historically I would say that Fedora was more cutting edge, while Ubuntu tried to put out a somewhat stable final version.
But I'm not so sure with 8.04.
Fedora can be very annoying at times because it makes no attempt to support anything non open-source. Hence the new xorg version F9 ships with does not work with the proprietary nvidia driver - installing flash and such requires some more work, and might actually be too much for a new user (It's not the difficulty, it's the amount).

I would recommend Ubuntu 7.10 - wait another 6 months or so to upgrade to 8.04 - the new sound system is highly unstable - I had about a dozen individual and reported bugs simultaneously - I know it works for many people, but I would suggest you wait.

Something not pointed out yet ... You want to check the md5sum of the ISO you downloaded before burning to CD/DVD. This will ensure your download was successful and without errors. Also, some distros have a disc checksum checking option for testing the disk after burn. This ensures not only a good download, but a good installation CD.

Also, what farslayer said about CentOS is a good option, in my opinion. CentOS is a stable, and stable free "clone" of RHEL. If you're planning to run this as a production server, you don't want to run the bleeding edge distros, as they can contain bugs (errors and security holes) that have not been worked out yet. Fedora is an example of bleeding edge.

Good luck.

Sounds good. SlowCoder, thanks for the checksum reminder. I checked the ISO against the Ubuntu spec and it matched so there's that. Think I'll go with Ubuntu for now rather than burning 7 Fedora CDs. I do like the CentOS idea, for round 2. This server is purely for my own edification, not production. I work on the front end with databases and the like but am wanting to escape the world of Windows and to also learn something about operating systems, networking - basically what it sounds like you all have been doing for some time. Thanks again for the help.

You should be able to get Fedora on a DVD instead of multiple CDs eg https://shop.linuxit.com.au/ , see list on right