I cant add specifific information to your problem, but there are three
things that might be possible here:

i) look if there is a bios-upgrade for your machine. Maybe this solves
everything.

ii) look if there is a bios-downgrade for your machine !! maybe just
your very specific bios-version has certain problems/errors.

iii) maybe your bios is known to have problems with linux. The specific
errormessages indicate this. This means that the kind of problems is
documented somewhere and you might find a list of broken things there,
which would relax your future troubleshootings on your machine.

best,
peter

John Stumbles wrote:
> dmesg reports
> Dell Latitude with broken BIOS detected. Refusing to enable the local APIC.
>
> (Mdk 10.0 on Latitude CPx H500GT)
>
> What are the consequences of this brokenness of the BIOS (and what is an
> APIC?). I've been having problems trying to get a RalinkTek (sic: not
> Realtek) RT2500 PCMCIA wireless card working: with Ralinktek's drivers it
> kinda works but crawls (see
> http://61.222.76.235/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=196#196) and with ndiswrapper it
> hangs without even a kernel Oops despite having been compiled with 'make
> DEBUG=1' (my message about this to the ndiswrapper-general mailing list
> doesn't seem to have made it onto the web archive of the list at
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/f...forum_id=36471 even though I
> saw my message via the list itself).
>
> I also have occasional problems with k3b giving errors trying to erase or
> burn CDs: exiting and restarting k3b, or if that fails rebooting, fixes
> this. Suspend and resume also works sometimes but other times leaves the
> screen corrupted.
>
> Are any or all of these problems consistent with the broken BIOS report? And
> is it possible to upgrade the BIOS, and if so how (open case and replace
> chip, or flash upgrade?)
>
> Also in the bootup/dmesg messages it asks me to 'report your bios at
> http://linux.dell.com/edd/results.html'. There are several things I don't
> understand here. STFW tells me that EDD is BIOS Enhanced Disk Drive calls,
> for which I am none the wiser (though I am at least better informed :-)
> The page says "Under Linux 2.5.44 or above, you can enable CONFIG_EDD
> (CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL is also necessary), and load the 'edd' module" but
> doesn't say how you might do these things. I'm not clear what the point of
> the whole exercise is, especially if the BIOS is broken anyway?
>
>


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