I recently bought a used Dell Optiplex 745 on Ebay for $100, and have been playing around with Sabayon on this machine.
Although I've run into several problems, I don't think anything reported here is relevant to our release of Sabayon 8. This machine is 5 years old, and apparently these problems haven't been bothering too many other people. So I don't think many people are using these old Dells for Sabayon. :) First, a summary of the system specs: Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.40GHz (2 cores) RAM: 1 GB Graphics Card: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Integrated Graphics Controller. Audio: Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller At least I can document a few of the work-arounds in case anybody else decides to try to press one of these machines into Linux service. And if we start to run into other people with similar problems, at least we know I have a machine to test some solutions. Problem #1) The console goes dead about half-way through the boot sequence. X11 eventually comes to life, but the display dies when I try to go to the console. I've seen some references to this problem on the Internet, but I haven't resolved it yet. Problem #2) Sabayon won't recognize any resolutions over 640x480. While doing some Googling, I have seen several references to this problem. It seems to stem from Linux's difficulty in probing the monitor with the integrated graphics card supplied in this machine. I was able to resolve this problem by populating /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the monitor settings from another computer that has used the same monitor. I noted that Scientific Linux 6.1 handled the monitor resolution fine, but I haven't dug into why yet. Problem #3) Our installer won't work in 640x480 resolution. It will start out OK, but as I advance through the installation screens, the control buttons eventually disappear off the bottom of the screen. My resolution here was the same as above. Manually edit xorg.conf to allow higher resolutions settings, and re-run the installer. Problem #4) CPU frequency scaling is not working, and this old dinosaur runs hot! First, we've dropped support for p4-clockmod. In researching this problem, I've seen some intermittent claims that the acpi-cpufreq driver should superceed the p4-clockmod driver. However, I could not get acpi-cpufreq to work. After building a kernel with p4-clockmod support, I still had to use a user-land tool get any progress. My general impression is that the 2.6.32 kernel from Scientific Linux is working much cooler than the 3.2.1 kernel I've built, but since temperature monitoring is not supported, I may have to come up with some method to support that impression. Problem #5) Temperature Monitoring isn't working. My Googling seems to indicate that this controller is not supported in Linux yet (and since it's 5 years old, it probably never will be at this point). OK, that's enough for now. Despite all these problems, I've still managed to get Sabayon up and running OK, and even though the CPU is old, the twin 3.4GHz processors still make it feel pretty snappy. So for only $100, it is still kind of interesting to me. :)
