Dell – Page 2 – Trond's place

One of the old webservers at work, a Dell PowerEdge R200, crashed a couple of weeks ago. I suspect the six year old motherboard finally gave up.

The strange combination of FreeBSD/i386, stable/10, OpenSSL from ports, optimized assembly code, Dell PowerEdge 1950, Intel Xeon X5450@3.00GHz, and BIOS 2.5.0, resulted in core dumps for all applications linked with OpenSSL from ports.

A colleague came into my office claiming the camera in his Dell Latitude E5540 didn’t work. Here’s a link to the Dell Latitude E5540 Owner’s Manual. After a bit of troubleshooting, I removed the display bezel. Lo and behold, the camera connector was halfway out of its socket. Once I pressed the connector into place, […]

Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 fails to notify Windows 7 when the SSID changes. The result is that the wireless interface retains the previous and possibly invalid IP addresses and other settings. The latest driver, A11, only a few days old, isn’t helpful at all. I usually avoid installing Intel’s own utility for managing wireless […]

A Dell Latitude E6430 had Windows 7 reinstalled this August, and the firmware was upgraded along to revision A15. Somehow the firmware setting for Optimus video got disabled and I regrettably missed the change. Today, while upgrading the firmware to revision A16, I spotted the disabled Optimus video setting. Thus, I enabled the setting, and […]

A student had recently installed Autodesk Inventor Professional 2014 SP1 on his Dell Inspiron 7520, running Windows 8.1. Inventor refused to run and crashed with a more or less useless crash report. It turns out that Dell or possibly someone else hadn’t properly installed the driver for the AMD Radeon HD graphics card. Catalyst Control […]

None of the below is relevant as of 2014-06-06, other than the possible need of reverting sys/dev/pci/pci.c. I have confirmed that FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 r267147 works as expected on Dell OptiPlex GX260. If you happen to run FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 on older Dell desktop PCs, like an OptiPlex GX260, you might want to back out r262226 prior […]

Update 2015-01-05: I was more or less forced to adopt VT, UTF-8, KMS, and DRM2 when I upgraded my laptop from stable/9 to stable/10 in the time between Christmas of 2014 and New Year of 2015. My laptop, a Dell Latitude D531 of mid-2007 design, is equipped with the AMD/ATI Radeon X1270 GPU. What an […]

The latest Oracle Java RE 7u51 at its normal level of “High” security causes the Dell iDRAC6 virtual console (version 1.95 (Build 05)) to die with this Java trace: java.lang.SecurityException: Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar: https://hostname.some.domain:443/software/avctKVM.jar at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source) at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source) at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.doLaunchApp(Unknown Source) at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Simply […]

A brand new Dell Latitude E6530 found its way to my office to be prepared for use for one of my coworkers. I was surprised to learn that the F2 key doesn’t allow you to enter the BIOS Setup. The computer simply freezes and the screen remains black. Just moments prior the firmware showed in […]

Category: Dell

Dell PowerEdge R320, JBOD, mfi(4), and gpart(8)

FreeBSD/i386, stable/10, OpenSSL from ports, optimized assembly code, Dell PowerEdge 1950, Xeon X5450@3.00GHz, and BIOS 2.5.0

Loose camera connector in Dell Latitude E5540

Dell Latitude E7240 and Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260

Dell Latitude E6430 and the firmware setting for Optimus video

Autodesk Inventor Professional 2014 SP1 and Dell Inspiron 7520

FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 on Dell OptiPlex GX260

FreeBSD VT aka newcons in base/head

Dell iDRAC6 and Oracle Java RE 7u51

F2 key not working on your Dell Latitude E6530? Try the F12 key and select BIOS Setup instead