Dell – Page 2 – Trond's place

I’m in the process of readying a brand new Dell Precision 7710. I’m close to completion. The only thing I’m missing is a driver for the nVidia Quadro M4000M GPU.

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 […]

Category: Dell

Strange storage systems at 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