I recently inherited a Dell PowerEdge 2600 server with dual Xeons and 4 GB of RAM. It's a nice system, and I have a small home based IT consulting business, but I'm a Windows/Mac guy. Since buying a Mac a couple of years ago, I've really grown to like the power and flexability of Unix like operating systems.

I'd like to look in to using Linux on this server, but I'm at a loss for where to start. I tried downloading Ubuntu, but the install does not make it past the Ubuntu boot screen because of the RAID array. I've successfully installed Ubuntu on my MacBook in Parallels and on a PC. I've also installed Kubuntu on an older P4 system for a friend, so I have some background, but servers are entirely new to me. On a Windows system, I'd either slipstream the RAID driver, or use the F6 option to load at boot.

So, where should I start? Is there a server oriented distro that I should be looking at? Are some distros more "Dell friendly" than others? I noticed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is listed as an option on the Server Assistant CD, but I was hoping to use one of the free distributions.

These are the 2 that I use for my servers running on Dell systems.

CentOS
http://www.centos.org

Pretty much RedHat without the support and logos

Debian Etch
http://www.debian.org

Does the CentOS installer give the opportunity to install SCSI drivers, or do I need to do something like a slipstream to the installer?

Hi bradleyland, not a hard core expert but here goes.

My prefered ditro is Slackware and whilst I have not configured any enterprise level servers, I have successfully used Slack on a multitude of hardware, both up to date, and ancient. The key here is to use a precompiled server that has the driver support for the RAID card. I will assume that the array is configured to your requirements, so now to install the OS. Again, I have to stress that I have only Slack experience, but I would hope that other distros are similar. When booting to the distro DVD/CD you are presented with a boot prompt. From here you should be able to tell the insatllation which kernel you wish to use. Slack has a number of precompiled kernels with support for SCSI, SATA or ATA and variations thereof, ie you could select the raid.i kernel for support for various raid controllers (exact types are detailed in the SLACKWARE-HOWTO).

In short you will need to identify which kernel has support for your controller and use that. Slack has details in the HOWTO as mentioned, but if not your choice of distro, without a doubt, someone will point you in the right direction here, or under the distro specific forum.

Good luck.

Ashley

Oops, my bad.

That should read raid.s (as in SCSI), .i's are IDE

Ashley

I can see the module for it in the kernel config. The issue is to get a distro that has it pre-compiled for the installer, of course. It looks like the module should be called megaraid_mbox.

Well, I found a working distro.... but it's not Linux FreeBSD works with all the hardware in this server out of the box, PERC RAID included. It's not Linux, but it's free, open, and as I understand it, secure, so I'm going to give it a shot.

Thanks for all the suggestions. If this doesn't work out, I've got a good set of suggestions to work from now

Remember you can visit the mailing lists at: lists.us.dell.com

there are many community members who can share best practices with you regarding installing different linux distros on Dell hardware.