I'm running Fedora on a Dell Optiplex SX270. I'm having a problem with the video adapter (Intel 865) where I can't get it to use any resolution higher than 640x480. I know that there are known issue's with the Intel i845 and i865 chipsets, but I was able to get around this problem on the Optiplex SX260 using the i845 chipset. In the BIOS, I set the video buffer RAM to 8MB (from 1MB) and it fixed the issue. The SX270 uses the Intel 865 video card, and the BIOS fix doesn't seem to do anything with this card. Is there anything else that I can try to get Linux going on the SX270?
Probably a buggy Dell BIOS. Downgrading the BIOS to A02 solved this problem for me.
There is some discussion about this here:
Thanks Norman, that article above solved the problem (downgraded the BIOS to AO2). I'm not sure how I missed that one when I was googling though..