Maximum PC

Sorry if this is in the right section.

I currently have a PowerEdge 1550 server that runs windows just fine. The problem is that I only have a license for Xp home which doesnt see 2 physical processors.

The thing is is that no form of linux i have tried works correctly. I have tried Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server as well as CentOS5 and none of them work.

With the CentOs live CD boots up with all sorts of errors and when it finally gets up there are errors all over the place. The login screen doesnt even work properly without crashing. With Ubuntu the installs would always fail.

Any ideas? Any help is appreciated.

What exactly are the errors is stating?

My initial thought is the SCSI controller is probably giving you fits, but you're not really offer much as to what you're seeing.

Have you tried the alternate CD for Ubuntu instead of the livecd by chance?

When you say XP Home does not see two physical processors, are you talking about two separate and discrete single-core processors, or two processor cores on one chip? My XP Home sees two cores on one chip easily (Athlon 64 X2 4200+).

It's a dual processor machine....and home doesn't exactly support SMP.

Yeah XP home is cool with two cores one die, not so much with the whole two socket configurations.

I would agree with the earlier comment. Linux is probably complaining about the SCSI card. Can you elaborate on what type of card it is?

Post some of the errors from CentOS. It sounds like that may be the best bet at this point. There are several posts out on the net regarding PowerEdge 1550 and CentOS; it looks like a missing kernel module.

Some of the errors during the CentOS live cd boot are: unable to determine aperature size and serverworks cnb20he is unsupported due to a lack of documentation.

I will retry installing both types of Ubuntu to see what exactly the problem is.
How would i know what kind of SCSI card there is?

Also it says : The greeter application apears to be crashing. Attempting to open a new one. When I press ok it brings up a loggin screen that flickers and when I press ok on that it goes into a little white box then tries to turn in to the desktop.

After that the greeter application error comes up again.

That actually sounds more like someething to do with video.

Documentation errors would lead me towards just simply a bad burn.

Post your complete hardware specs.

2 PIII 933mhz processors.
1024mb sd ram
1 10k rpm hdd.
Built in ATI RAGE grapichs with 4mb of video ram.
Is there anything else i should include?

What kind of back plane / drive controller?

Link us to the support page on dell's site.

Is this what your looking for?
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/s ... C580a1.pdf

I can't get anything at Dell to load at the moment, but the PowerEdge 1550 has the cnb20he chipset (which is poorly supported by Linux, most likely the root of the problem), integrated AIC-7899G SCSI controller, and optional PERC 3/DLC.

A quick googling found an old post on the CentOS forum saying that CentOS4 wouldn't run at all on a cnb20he based system. With the conservative nature of RHEL (which CentOS is based off of), its probable that CentOS hasn't changed a lot in this regard. That same post did say that a version of Fedora from the same era did run though. So maybe try Fedora?

I will try Fedora.

Any ideas what went wrong with Ubuntu?

I have no idea. They could be using a configuration with their kernel that is similar enough to RHEL's kernel that it's has the same behavior.