HP ProLiant DL320 G4

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This article is part of the Hardware series.

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[edit] Introduction

This page is meant to serve as confirmation that Gentoo x86 can indeed be installed on the HP ProLiant DL320 G4 hardware.

[edit] Specifications

This particular server unit contains:

• hyperthreaded Pentium 4 3.4 GHz CPU
• 1 GB RAM
• SATA controllers (Intel ICH7 series; kernel component: ata_piix)
• 2 gigabit ethernet network interfaces (NC324I PCI-X Gigabit LOM; kernel component: tg3)

There is much more to the unit, but these are the features I care about since it is a server.

[edit] Gentoo Installation

I first attempted installation from Gentoo x86 Universal 2005-1 r1. The distribution started just fine. However, the NIC hardware was not detected. The NICs, it turns out, are supported, but the older distribution did not come with the code to support them.

Gentoo x86 2006.0 detects the NICs on startup. However, the startup process always seemed to hang during the hardware detection portion. Thus, it was necessary to specify "nodetect" when starting the kernel. After startup, I loaded the ata_piix module for the Intel SATA and tg3 module for the gigabit NICs and had no problems with the remainder of the Gentoo installation.