New workstation at work

So I recently got a new Dell Precision T7500n as my workstation at work. It is a pretty nice box that has had only one problem getting setup, and some nice unexpected surprises. First the unexpected surprise. This morning I logged into to be greeted by a popup from Fedora saying that I had a failing hard drive. The utility is called palimpsest and it is pretty nifty. It said that SMART had detected some errors and that the hard drive would fail soonish. So I called up Dell and told them about the SMART errors. A new drive should be showing up here sometime tomorrow. Very nice experience over all.

Now, as for getting Fedora 11 running on this new system, it was relatively easy. First thing is when you boot it up, go into the BIOS. All sorts of wonderful things are disabled or set to be conservative. You should enable VT, SMT, and tell the hard drives not to run in quiet mode at the very least. But feel free to play around in there. When you install, make sure you only have one monitor hooked up. The nouveau drivers work pretty well if you only need one screen. But, if you plugin a second screen, you get a hard kernel lock, and if you boot up with two screens attached xorg locks the card. So if you want dual screen, go with the Nvidia drivers. I look forward to being able to use the nouveau drivers when that bug gets fixed. Other than that, it is a beast of a machine. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a new workstation.