Does anyone run Mint on my server hardware? HP ML110 Xeon

[johnwillis]

Hi, I have a Xeon Based HP ML110 server. It doesn't have Linux Mint listed as the supported OS's but it works with SUSE and FC 7.

It's basic components are:

Xeon 3.2Ghz Dual Core
2Gb DDR2 RAM
2 x 160Gb SATA-II Harddrive in RAID 1 using onboard SATA controller
ATI Onboard 8Mb Graphics
CD/DVDRW Drive

It works perfectly under Windows 2003, but I want to try setting up my own Apache, Postfix, VSFTPD, Samba and CUPS server.

If anyone has any hints for this hardware or any quirks that are known I'd appreciate it.

John

[scorp123]

Hi, I have a Xeon Based HP ML110 server. It doesn't have Linux Mint listed as the supported OS's but it works with SUSE and FC 7.

Of course it's not listed Corporate policy & strategy. They will only list distros which they could re-sell and charge money for and thus get even more money via the support contracts and partner agreements they have with Red Hat and Novell ... There is a ton of (free) distros that would work on that machine too only that HP won't tell you about that

It's basic components are:
Xeon 3.2Ghz Dual Core
2Gb DDR2 RAM
2 x 160Gb SATA-II Harddrive in RAID 1 using onboard SATA controller
ATI Onboard 8Mb Graphics
CD/DVDRW Drive

Yes, I had a few of those machines. Debian, Ubuntu and Mint should work on it. The ATI-based "Mach64" graphics card is a bit slow though ... but then again: This is a server, so for a server it's OK if the graphics are slow ....

If anyone has any hints for this hardware or any quirks that are known I'd appreciate it.

There are several versions of the ML-110 ... some versions have an unsupported SATA controller that simply won't work with Linux regardless of what HP claims. They produce a binary-only + closed source driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) but even that one doesn't work too well, and plus the driver depends on specific kernel versions so using "alien" to convert the driver's *.rpm package into a Debian *.deb package won't help you much --- it just won't work. And calling HP's support is pretty much useless these days, all the good people (like myself ) have gone and support has been outsourced to India ...

So best thing you could do is: Get yourself a live CD, e.g. Mint 3.0 "Cassandra" and try if you can boot it on your ML-110 and check if you can see and access the harddisks .... then check if you see any error messages e.g. when executing the dmesg command.

If you can successfully boot the Live CD and can access the harddisks then all should be fine and you probably have one of the ML-110 versions that do properly work with Linux. In the other case I'd suggest to use something else, just don't waste your time and try to get your non-Linux-friendly ML-110 (if you have one of those versions that is) to work with Linux ... been there, done that: was a complete waste of time. In my case I had to return my batch of ML-110's to Corporate IT and order a batch of newer versions from our factories ...

HP hardware all in all is very Linux-friendly these days but with the ML-110's you could still have bad luck, depending on the disk controllers and all the other hardware they put in there it either works immediately and perfectly out of the box or never ever.

[johnwillis]

thanks for your help...

I've booted it from the cd and i'm pleased to say all is good! hehe.

my server is now up and running! wicked

thanks for your help!