It’s been a process of elimination to get my Dell E521 working. Previous workarounds with boot options didn’t work…so I had to use a combination of boot options to get things working nice and stable.
I powered up the PCLinuxOS 2007 Final LiveCD and began the installation to disk. During the bootloader configuration I appended the following text to the end of my linux, failsafe, and framebuffer entry:
noacpi irqpoll pci=routeirq
From there, I saved, closed all programs and rebooted. Upon first boot I opened Synaptic and installed the PCLinuxOS .a64 Kernel which is optimized for 64 bit processors. I then opened up the PCLinuxOS Control Center yet again, went to the boot section and altered my grub bootloader again with the same information in the code above. I rebooted to make sure my changes worked.
When logging in this time, I opened Synaptic and installed the Nvidia 97xx drivers for my graphics card (Fata1ity 7600GT). After this installs you’re prompted to restart X and upon login…you should be presented with quite a stable and quick desktop.
Hopefully this works well for those of you out there that are using E521’s or E520’s as I believe they have the same mainboard (not sure though).
My congratulations. You’ve made it. And I even can’t launch RedHat Linux on my own PC 🙁
Hi – Just stumbed upon your blog here while looking around for info on any E521 specific details or updates, and I noticed that you’ve had quite a bit of trouble. Well, I’d like to say that I’ve got one too, a 3600+, but my BIOS is more recent than the one you indicate, it’s 1.1.6 (which I believe is from April). I don’t see this on Dell’s site, but you may want to get in touch with them since I’ve had zero troubles with this machine and Ubuntu or FreeBSD (which is what I’m running with now). It’s been rock solid stable and I’ve got it crammed with drives and a GeForce 7900. I’m loving it. It’s quiet, fast, and was quite inexpensive.
Best.
-jsnyder
I’ve found it on Dell’s FTP site for BIOS updates…and you’re right, it isn’t published.
The link is: ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/bios/
By now, I feel pretty punch drunk. My Dell E521 has been kicking my beehind for quite a few days as I’ve tried to
install PCLinuxOS 2007 Final. I’ve used all the boot options in my arsenal and couldn’t stop it from freezing
after 30 mi