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"For a long time, Linux was dominated by hackers and somewhat of a less organized group. The result is a slowdown in innovation and a reluctance in enterprises to accept this solution," he said. "This has to grow up."

"The EnFuzion(TM) software (the "Software") is a proprietary product of TurboLinux. * * * You may not copy (except as expressly permitted in Section 2), modify, or create derivative works of the Software."

The Advanced Traffic Manager application, turboclusterd, will be released under the TurboLinux Software License. Source code for this component will not be released and redistribution of this component is not allowed.

but there are a lot more available options for support (well-documented, as well as "speaking to a human" options) for Microsoft products than Open Source stuff.

Here are three Linux companies that can do that:

• Mission Critical Linux
  
• Red Hat Software
  
• TurboLinux
  
• Debian (non-profit)
  
• 
  

  
  Plus, you can hire whomever you want (including that really great programmer you know) to fix Linux for you.
  
  

If you are looking for software to create a cluster, there are several, depending upong what type of cluster you are trying to create. If you are creating a service-based cluster, check out TurboLinux Cluster Server, Linux Virtual Servers, PolyServe Understudy, and Legato. There are many others available, including hardware solutions from Cisco, F5, and Alteon. I'm not too familiar with Beowulf-type clusters.

If you are looking for software to manage groups of systems, that's a whole different story. You might look into Enlighten DSM, Tivoli, or OpenNMS. I'm sure there's a lot of competition in that field as well, but I don't have any experience with those products.

Word 6.0 was for Win 3.1. Word for Windows 95 was Word 7.0... anyway, Microsoft merged their DOS and Windows Word trees at that point, and adopted the Word for DOS version number (6.0) instead of the next Word for Windows version number. Microsoft doesn't skip version numbers just to look good (*cough* *cough*).

A few months ago the Los Alamos National Laboratory magazine "BITS" featured an article on some of the people who now work for TurboLabs, and who were then working at LANL's Advanced Computing Lab. They produced a machine called Rockhopper, which had 128 nodes of dual-processor PIII machines IIRC. The networking architecture was characterized as a "superset of Beowulf", with much higher speed connections than mere 100Mbps ethernet and other architectural improvements. I believe their goal was to scale up this SuperBeowulf type of machine to much greater levels of performance. Then they quit the Lab and formed TurboLabs. I look forward to seeing some results someday soon from such a capable team.

I sincerely hope these folks are doing fine since we all got run out of town on May 10th by that damn fire.

When Linux was cranking up last year the folks at TurboLinux sales called up promoting their fault tolerant cluster solution, altho it's not free you could get a timed demo - so Linux solutions exist.

Just a general observation - Linux is pretty well fleshed out with about anything you can think of in one form or another, it just isn't chasing you down with in-your-face ads and high pressure sales promos like other comercial products, so it may appear to be deficient but more often than not just a few days (for us slow pokes) search and trials will usually turn up an inexpensive quality solution in some stage of development hidden somewhere.

With Intel's investments in Linux companies like Red Hat and TurboLinux, it was only a matter of time before these companies would have alpha-grade ports available, even if mainstream hardware isn't available.

If I'm not mistaken, TurboLinux was the first Linux distro ported to and released for IA-64, about two months ago.

March 20 press release

< tofuhead >

With Intel's investments in Linux companies like Red Hat and TurboLinux, it was only a matter of time before these companies would have alpha-grade ports available, even if mainstream hardware isn't available.

If I'm not mistaken, TurboLinux was the first Linux distro ported to and released for IA-64, about two months ago.

March 20 press release

< tofuhead >

The High availability cluster is something else entirely. These clusters are not built for speed, but rather reliability and distributed load bearing. It usually means a group of machines that behave to the user as if they are one. Kind of like a certain major website that we're on. You generally have one or two traffic servers whose job is to send requests to the computer that meets certain criteria. Perhaps you want load balancing web servers. The traffic computers would send some requests to one server, some other requests to the other server, and so on based on some predetermined criteria. It can also be used to make sure no requests go to a dead machine. There is some real good information on this out there, but the most easily digestible is probably at TurboLinux and their High Availability Cluster solution and RedHat with their Piranha solutions.

I know that was oversimplified, but I hope that it helps.

There are several other linux ppc distributions under way including:

Debian Linux
Rock Linux

Turbo Linux
APUS Linux for Power Up Amigas
Yellow Dog Linux (Based on RedHat)

I don't quite see this "unanimous standardization" that you are referring to. Redhat and TurboLinux both offer Gnome as the default desktop. Mandrake, OpenLinux, and Corel Linux offer KDE as the default. Most distributions offer both as desktop choices.

Like it or not, while the Linux community is doing the parallel development thing, in the Linux industry, the race is pretty much over.

Far from it. I can name 3 companies devoting many manhours and cash to Gnome development: RHAD Labs, Eazel, and Helix Code. Companies such as MandrakeSoft and Corel are funding KDE development. The race, if anything, is just beginning to get interesting...

Yeah, I know about Eazel. Judging by the amount of hype they've generated, all I can say about them is: show me the code.

okay:

here is some of it.
----

First, this is not a web-only service. We do like to provide web interfaces to as much as possible, but we do realize that for some things, program compliation and testing included, nothing can substitute for shell access.

A lot of people are asking about other hardware architectures and OS's. For now, the Compile Farm is i386 based, and contains several Linux distributions and FreeBSD. This does not mean that we have ruled out other possibilities. This is just another step in what we hope can be an expanding feature set for Open Source developers on SourceForge.

There is a lot of setup involved in something like this Compile Farm, not the least of which is having thousands of skilled Open Source developers with shell accounts on a set of boxes. We're attempting to keep things as secure as possible while also offering enough features to make this thing useful. One reason for the limited number of distributions/architectures/OS's now is the limitation of variables in a very complex system. Hopefully, we can work out the kinks in this system soon so that it can become a valuable resource to developers who might not otherwise have the capability of getting their hands on so many different machines.

Please be patient as we test this new system. We're definately open to criticism, but please also be constructive with it so that we can continue to improve these services. Thanks to all of the SourceForge users who have contributed patches, criticism, and helpful suggestions. Every day my confidence in the Open Source model increases...

I got a free Turbo 4.0 with vol2 of Linux Mag I think. Looked like RH with a few extra tweaks and apps.

I know they have been arround awhile but they seem to be marketing their products like the Old Gaurd.

Check out their download page. Care to register first? If that doesn't discourage you how about skipping strait to the "download/install" page where you have two options:

There are two primary ways to download and install TurboLinux:

1). FTP Install
2). Local Hard Drive Install

Not exactly encouraging to the 99.9% of potential users who have at best a 56K connection and maybe little experience installing Linux. And if you try to go to ftp.turbolinux.com to download the entire distro you get a dead link.

I got a free Turbo 4.0 with vol2 of Linux Mag I think. Looked like RH with a few extra tweaks and apps.

I know they have been arround awhile but they seem to be marketing their products like the Old Gaurd.

Check out their download page. Care to register first? If that doesn't discourage you how about skipping strait to the "download/install" page where you have two options:

There are two primary ways to download and install TurboLinux:

1). FTP Install
2). Local Hard Drive Install

Not exactly encouraging to the 99.9% of potential users who have at best a 56K connection and maybe little experience installing Linux. And if you try to go to ftp.turbolinux.com to download the entire distro you get a dead link.

If you are looking for the kind of clustering that Windoze NT does, then you want something like TurboCluster Server from TurboLinux, it is clustering for high availability and high throughput for web servers. TurboLinux

If you need more general load balancing clustering for enterprise applications, look at Linas Vepstas's Linux Enterprise Computing pages at http://linas.org/linux/, he has a section on clustering on that page.

If you need supercomputer numbercrunching or render-farm type clustering, then the Beowulf approach is what you want. Linas' pages also have a section on Beowulf type clustering.

At least according to this link on the turbolinux Web site.

Can anyone comment on the reputation Dell presently has in Japan?

timothy

Well, how does TurboLinux differ from the situation above? Well...

• TurboLinux figured out from the *beginning* that it was to their advantage to release their module under GPL. Caldera's distribution went through several revisions before they decided to make the source code available.
• The size modification to the kernel is smaller! NKFS was 2940 lines of code, IP_CS is 2781 lines of code
• IP_CS is better broken up into approx 60 functions whereas NKFS is only broken into approx 50 functions.
• The header files for NKFS has only two lines of comment explaining the purpose of the data structures. The IP_CS header file has comments next to every variable and function defined.
• The NDS browser uses RSA code which is under patent and US export control which means that Caldera probably will never release the entire source code (if any) of the program which uses the NKFS module. TurboLinux has indicated that as newer versions of the cluster server daemon comes out that they will release the source code to the older versions.
• NKFS has never been a part of the offical kernel source distribution and Caldera has never indicated that they will try to submit it for being included. IP_CS is also presently not part of the offical kernel source distribution but TurboLinux appears to be interested in submitting it for being included in future major versions of the kernel.
• The November 1999 Linux Journal lists Caldera's website as having had approx 10,000 visits whereas TurboLinux was listed as having less than 2,000. It seems clear that Caldera has five times the influce in pushing a prioritary fork.

So why are we getting so upset over the fact that George Weiss of Gartner Group Inc. has "fork fears"?! Isn't this the same G. Weiss that in January had fears about the "chaotic nature of the [Linux] market." He goes on to state "... best practices would entail putting in place practices to discourage, if not ban, code hacking when using Linux." Does this guy really understand Linux? The fact is that being able to code hack linux is one of it's biggest advantages. Another advantage is the growing number of non-standard modules. For example: you get better performce with INN v2 if you have rawfs, your not going to get far on the network with a Madge token ring card unless you have loaded the non-standard Madge kernel module driver and if you want to really fork from standard kernel method just put a distribution together based around the results of the GGI Project or RTLinux. Non-standard kernel patches and modules have been around for a long time and IP_CS is no different. History has shown that the main Linux kernel can survive this "problem." So, hand a spoon to Mr Weiss' "fork fears" and enjoy what TurboLinux is providing under GPL.

I am the kernel maintainer for TurboLinux. Your email hasn't arrived in my mail box yet. I suspect that you sent others in my organization. Most of us are at ISPCon, so it hasn't filtered to me yet.

We have no intent of packaging and maintaining a seperate linux kernel tree. It would be too much work for no benefits.

Our kernel RPMs includes the base standard kernel tarball and additional patches. You can get all the additional patches out of the .src.rpm file. You can build a complete kernel from the .src.rpm file.

I have not put up a web-page or submitted it to Linus et al as I have not had time. Our primary concern is getting a quality product to our customers.

You may get the TurboLinux Cluster Kernel Patch here (You'll need to hold shift to download):
cluster-kernel-4.0.5-19991009.tgz

Does this answer all your questions?

Ciao!

We are overworked as is. I will not, as TurboLinux's Kernel Maintainer (Kernel Colonel?), fork the kernel off. Having Alan Cox, and the wonderful crew in Linux-Kernel maintian the core stable kernel makes my life *much* easier.

The Cluster Module is just a module! It can be compiled in later after the kernel is done. It cannot (yet, as far as I can see) be compiled into the kernel as a non-module.

Feel free to grab the cluster module and see for yourself (You'll need to hold shift):
cluster-kernel-4.0.5-19991009.tgz

Ciao!

I am the kernel maintainer for TurboLinux. I'd like to dispell a few myths here:

• The kernel isn't "forking" from what Linus distributes anymore than Debian, Redhat, SUSE, etc. do. We add extra patches for enhanced functionality, like raid, IBM Serveraid, etc.
• The actual kernel patch that is used by TurboCluster is *in the kernel rpm*. You can grab the source rpm and look at it.
• The TurboCluster was based upon the Virtual Server in the beginning. Since then we have hired a company to re-write it from scratch. There is nothing left of VS in the Cluster code, except some concepts (but none of their code). Did I mention it is GPL'ed in the source.
• Did I mention that all the patches are available from the kernel source RPM?
• At some point, the Cluster module will be submitted to Linus. However, we only know it works for 2.2.x. I *will* submit it for 2.3 and 2.5 (if it doesn't make 2.3), but I am in the process of re-writing the kernel RPM and am very busy. It needs to have all the CONFIG options and such added in, and checked to work in 2.3.x.
• The TurboClusterD (the only non-GPL part of TurboCluster) will be OpenSource'd in the future. Our current plan (this is *not* an official commitment) is to release it as the next version comes out. The next version will be much better, of course.

I hope this addresses some people's concerns. Don't worry, I am **very** pro-GPL and am responsible for sanity checking these choices.

Ciao!

(aka Christian Holtje docwhat@turoblinux.com>)

People seem to forget that TurboLinux (formerly Pacific HiTech) has been developing a cluster product, which is still in beta, see the page here. Unfortunately, if you read the FAQ, only the kernel patch is GPL'd, the monitor application is going to be released under something called a "TurboLinux Software Licence" without source. Oh, well.

In TurboLinux Cluster server beta agreement it states that.
"This license is only for TurboLinux software components not under the GPL. Software components under the GPL include, but are not limited to, the Linux kernel, all modifications made to the Linux kernel, and many of the Linux programs included with the TurboLinux Server OS."

This would be a good comprimise
Note: the turbolinux beta site seems to be down or something.. but I had already copied it from yesterday (in a conversation in technocrat) and thought it appropriate to point out here.

We changed our name recently from Pacific HiTech to TurboLinux (more info at www.turbolinux.com), but we are the same company. We're beginning to focus on performance, high availability, etc.. And yes, Dave is here.. -- Justin Ryan Developer Relations, TurboLinux

I've got a cluster up and running a beta of TurboCluster (from our buddies at TurboLinux) with Apache atop it. This is a product that takes multiple machines (they've tested up to 12 nodes, I think) and makes them look like one big one. One node serves as a "router" (or "cluster controller" as some might call it) as well as being a node, and if that one goes down, another takes over. We've got the heartbeats and all that stuff.

It's - dare I say it? - EASY to set up, and it works. And that's the BETA code. They're getting ready for the official release of it later this month, I believe, and by then, I plan on having some "name brand" websites running on it for them to point to.

The only stuff it doesn't handle on its own yet is the synchronization of data and logfiles between the servers - but hey, that's a pain on ANY cluster, and there are a "metric shitload" of ways to deal with that under Linux. Everything from rsync and rdist to NFS and FibreChannel-based GFS. And VirtualFS, and Coda, and... did I miss any? :)

Imagine, if you will, a server cabinet containing a few Penguin Computing rackmounts running TurboCluster, a switch, and some sundry other stuff - maybe an NFS server, maybe an SQL server - and you've got one kickass server setup.

In the US TurboLinux 3.0.1 is USD 49. In Japan,
it is about the same price for TurboLinux 3.0 Japanese.

There are other products, one is a server and the other is TurboLinux Pro that incorporates a commercial office suite. These are more expensive. There is more information on both
Japanese products at http://www.turbolinux.com/products/in dex.html

I tried Debian 2.1, TurboLinux, and Redhat 5.2.

Why is SuSE different, or how?

If you want a commercial distribution, I recommend: TurboLinux 3.0.1.

As of January 19, 1999 TurboLinux 3.0.1 is now available both by FTP and on CD-ROM. The CD set retails for $49.95 and includes the distribution, full source code, a copy of Corel WP8 for Linux, and a full-size 250-page installation & usage manual. (A total of 3 CDs and one book, plus an attractive box). You can order online right now. is now available both by FTP and on CD-ROM. The CD set retails for $49.95 and includes the distribution, full source code, a copy of Corel WP8 for Linux, and a full-size 250-page installation & usage manual. (A total of 3 CDs and one book, plus an attractive box). You can order online right now.