Installing Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft on a Dell Optiplex GX620

Posted on November 5, 2006 by Michael Schurter

I wanted to install Ubuntu on my work computer, a Dell Optiplex GX620, over the weekend. It turned out to be harder than I was hoping.

The bad news is that Ubuntu’s installer tries to use the ati video driver instead of the radeon video driver. You can hop into a console and fix it, but even users with a moderate level of Linux experience won’t feel comfortable doing that.

Once I got that sorted out it works beautifully. I’m writing this post in Ubuntu 6.10 using Firefox 2.0! Time to install some eye candy…

Update:  Despite Ubuntu’s Forums best efforts to confuse everyone on how to enable ATI + Xgl + Compiz, I got it working with too much trouble.  It was fun, but now I’ve switched to Debian Etch because I’m just that big of a nerd.

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  • http://nekosxe.wordpress.com Kris Truitt

    Congratulations! I am writing this reply using firefox 2.0 in Ubuntu 6.10 also! My bosses where nice enough at the helpdesk to give away the old Latitude C600 laptops to all the student workers…they even had ubuntu burnt to disks for up to put on it!
    The question is…should i give this laptop to my gf or not? (that would be lame cause she would use more linux than i would then…)

  • http://digitalfiefdom.org AC

    Oddly we had the same problem with video cards on a Dell server, lacking the your l337 skillz I just reinstalled and selected something else, it didn’t take that long anyway.

  • Francisco Galera

    I read that you installed debian etch on a Dell Optiplex GX620. ¿Did you have any problems? I will get one of this machines in some days. And it seems that there were some problems with sata 2. But I am not sure that they are resolved.
    Thank you.

  • http://michael.susens-schurter.com/blog Michael Schurter

    @Francisco: Same X windows video driver issue with Debian, but other than that everything worked perfectly!