CentOS On New Dell

Home » CentOS » CentOS On New Dell
CentOS 8 Comments

Mmn, that didn’t work. I dd’d the latest Fedora Live iso onto a USB
drive, put it into a brand spanking new Dell Latitude E7470, hit F12
at Dell logo and got “Selected boot device failed”. Do I need to make it bootable using fdisk or some such?

Mike

8 thoughts on - CentOS On New Dell

  • some USB sticks don’t seem to like to be boot devices, and I’ve never figured out why. Sandisk stuff generally seems to work, and most all my current USB sticks are Sandisk Ultra Fit (the really tiny ones, typically in 16GB or 32GB).

  • I’ve had excellent luck with the 16 GB Mushkin atom – and they are fast too, really fast, I suspect some USB 3 thumb drives are really only USB
    2 and there will eventually be a lawsuit. But the Mushkin are really fast.

  • That was it. I was able to boot Fedora. I was using a 128GB USB 3.0
    drive. I tried a lowly 8GB drive and it worked.

    Thanks, Mike

  • Mike,

    So what was it to make you opt for E7470 over, say, Carbon X1? According to RedHat’s Hardware compatility list Carbon models are certified, while none of the Dell’s aren’t

    Also, have you given up on CentOS over Fedora? I’d love to hear how’s CentOS 7 support for E7470 hardware.

    Thanks, Milos.

  • Another reason is that I have heard about people having problems with Lenovo. Not just with software but with hardware malfunctions. I spoke to someone on the phone that had hardware problems with their new Thinkpad (although I suspect some of the problems could have been misdiagnosis by the user). After describing how nice the E7470 they’re thinking about dumping their 1yo X250 and getting a Dell.

    As for the Carbon, that is a very different computer. The Carbon is an ultralight / thin Macbook-like machine with Windows so I have no advice for you there.

    I have not tried CentOS on the E7470 but I’m quite certain it would not work because I have tried the latest Fedora Live which is about
    100 kernel revisions newer and even that doesn’t completely work. Specifically, if I plug in an external display it freezes. My feeling is I need a newer display driver (and thus newer kernel). The only other issue I noticed was that wireless didn’t work but it seems more like a glue issue and not necessarily a driver. Otherwise, suspend and everything else worked near as I can tell which is actually pretty impressive for a brand new machine.

    So, I am doing other things while this new E7470 ages like a fine wine. Or maybe I’ll loose patience and just install Fedora and try a
    “vanilla” kernel package. Then maybe after a year or two CentOS 8 or whatever will run on it and then I can just run steady for 4+ years without getting pummeled by stupid updates and feature creep that you get with Fedora and Ubuntu or whatever the latest hot distro is.

    The E7470 is obviously a laptop of choice for business people. And that is the type of machine developers use. So chances of good compatibility are very high. You just have to give it time.

    I was watching Daredevil season 1 and they use Latitudes that look exactly like mine. And that was probably filmed in 2014. So the form factor at least has been around for a while which is good. Unfortunately I can’t say the same thing about the show.

    Mike

  • –Dt21gFinJlb38suKGdtFDPgW42K8deOaq Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

    We have a newer installer that has a newer kernel than the base CentOS-7
    ISOs here, if anyone is having hardware detection / boot issues with the standerd ISOs:

    http://buildlogs.CentOS.org/CentOS/7/isos/x86_64/

    The *-99.iso are the ones with the newer installers .. so these are the latest right now:

    http://buildlogs.CentOS.org/CentOS/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1609-99.iso

    http://buildlogs.CentOS.org/CentOS/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1609-99.iso

    Thanks, Johnny Hughes

    –Dt21gFinJlb38suKGdtFDPgW42K8deOaq

  • Just to follow through, I installed Fedora F24 on this new Dell E7470
    and after dnf upgrade everything works. Originally the Fedora Live testdrive did not work completely (wireless choked and the external HDMI connection would hang the machine) but after installing to disk and updating (kernel when from 4.5 to 4.8) everything just worked. External display was recognised correctly and it installed my printer and printed a test page no problem.

    So Dell E7470 works great with F24.