Dell OptiPlex 9010 UEFI Problem?

Posted in Technical on July 13th, 2012 by p14nd4

If you ready my previous post, you already know that I’ve had frustrating issues with lock-ups in Ubuntu 12.04 on my new Dell OptiPlex 9010, and perhaps related oddities with errors reported in memtest86+. I opened a support ticket with Dell, and they shipped me a replacement system, which arrived today. The spoiler: it didn’t fix my problems. However, in the course of determining that fact, I may have further isolated the issue.

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Dell OptiPlex 9010 Ubuntu Linux Lock-Up

Posted in Technical on July 10th, 2012 by p14nd4

The History

I’ve been waiting for a while to get a new desktop computer at home. Back in 2006, I was biding my time to replace my dead desktop until the Windows Vista buy your computer now and we’ll give you Vista whenever it comes out program to be officially announced by Dell, and finally bought my OptiPlex 745 Small Form Factor PC (with a nearly top-of-the-line Conroe Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU) in October. Since that date, I’ve been running said computer nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it’s held up remarkably well.

While I ran Windows XP full time when I got it, I switched to Ubuntu full time (aside from playing through Portal when it came out) whenever I got my hands on Vista. That’s not to come as a condemnation of Vista, as everyone is so quick to do, but it just worked out that way: since I was going to do a fresh install on a fresh hard drive for Vista, it was a perfect opportunity to install Ubuntu alongside. And once Ubuntu was installed, I wanted to keep using it (as I had been full time in the months between my old desktop dying and purchasing that new computer). I preferred the desktop environment, window management, and most of the apps were either the exact same ones I used already on Windows (e.g. Opera, Firefox, Pidgin), or had suitable (if not preferable) replacements, with the exception of Foobar2000 and Media Player Classic (MPC). Things worked well, too!

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