RHEL5 is supported by Dell as of RHEL5 product launch in February 2007. Full Dell OpenManage support came in the OMSA 5.2 release in April 2007.

• RHEL4 is fully supported by Dell as of RHEL4 product launch in February 2005. Full Dell OpenManage support came in the OMSA 4.3 release in June 2005.

• Use Update 1 or higher install CDs for the PowerEdge 700 and 750 NICs, or get the driver disk from support.dell.com for "Gold".

• David Taylor created a bootnet floppy that includes the Intel e100, e1000, and bcm5700 drivers. This is handy for installing on newer servers that have embedded gigabit NICs.
• Josh provides instructions and an ISO for network installing 2.1AS on a PE1655MC blade server.

• Aacraid: See the Red Hat section on the RAID page for aacraid.
• Megaraid: See the Red Hat section on the RAID page for megaraid.

• Dell began selling SLES10 on 9th generation PowerEdge servers (x9xx), Intel EM64T (x86_64) architecture only. It is supported as a "Tier 1" operating system, meaning it has full OpenManage support. Novell/SuSE has further certified Dell systems on the i386 architecture as well, but these are not sold by Dell.

• Dell began selling SLES9 on 8th generation PowerEdge servers (x8xx), Intel EM64T (x86_64) architecture only, starting with Service Pack 3. It is supported as a "Tier 2" operating system, meaning it has limited OpenManage support, and no formal support from Dell for solutions that include Dell | EMC Fibre Channel arrays, running Oracle databases, and other such full solutions. (Support for such solutions may be available from the respective solutions vendors themselves). Novell/SuSE has further certified Dell systems on the i386 architecture as well, but these are not sold by Dell.
• System administrators are encouraged to use the Novell Maintenance Portal to update their system to SLES9 Service Pack 3 (SP3) or higher.

• Hubert Mantel has provided instructions and a megaraid driver disk for SuSE Enterprise Linux 8 which is based on UnitedLinux 1.0. This driver supports the PowerEdge 2600 ROMB. The first updated kernel for SLES8 also includes megaraid 1.18e, so upgrading to that will be easy.

• Jonathan Wilson writes in with instructions on installing SuSE Linux 8.1 on newer PowerEdge systems (disable acpi!).
• Guillaume Chambraud (EDS Answare) tells us he made a megaraid driver disk for the PowerEdge 2600 ROMB. (disk updated 23-Jan-2003).

• Andrew McCall, Paul Rivoli, and Steve Kuervers - tell us they've made a megaraid driver disk and instructions which supports PE2600 ROMB.

• Hubert Mantel has provided driver disks for for SuSE Linux 7.2, Enterprise Server 7, and Email Server III, for PE1650 and PE2650. gunzip these and dd each to a floppy.
  • aacraid driver disk
  • bcm5700 driver disk. If you don't need the driver at install time, please simply upgrade to the latest errata kernel for your product, which already includes this driver.
  • Instructions for creating such driver disks are found on SuSE's site.

• Aacraid: See the SuSE section on the RAID page for aacraid.

Most of the information below is for PowerEdge 8G servers (x8xx, SC1425) and is not current for 9G (x9xx) servers. See Debian on 9G for more information.

Debian on 8G and earlier

• Steve Mickeler has provided a Debian Woody netinst image for PE1650 and PE2650.
  • bootbf2.4.19-ac4.iso
  • GPG signature
  • md5sum
• Nick has provided a Debian Woody netinst image for PE2600.
  • tar.gz
  • GPG signature
• Christophe Kern has built a Debian ISO for installing on the PE1655MC blade server.
• Consult our OpenManage Contributions section to get OMSA working on Debian.

• Aacraid: See the Debian section on the RAID page for aacraid.
• Megaraid: See the Debian section on the RAID page for megaraid.

• Paul Rivoli has packaged up the megaraid 1.18h driver for Slackware 8.1. Installation instructions and files. This works on PE2600.
• (obsolete) Paul Rivoli has packaged up the megaraid 2.00rc5 driver for Slackware 8.1 for installation on a PE2600. megaraid2.s boot disk image (obsolete)

• Aacraid: See the Slackware section on the RAID page for aacraid.

• Corley Kinnane posted bootstrap disks which aren't distribution-specific. They can be found here.