Slashdot Mirror
The Haps from LWCE: Samba Wins, RH w/XFS, BOF
We've been at LinuxWorld for the last couple days, and some interesting stuff has been going on:
The SAMBA folks won the $25,000 IDG/Linus Torvalds award, and SGI announced the availability of RH7-based distro using XFS [?] . In other news, our BOF went well with many questions about Slashcode - and the Perl Monks booth has been doing great in donations. Update: 02/01 05:18 PM by CT : The highlight for me so far was judging the "Coveted" Golden Penguin Awards w/ Don. Actually, I seriously did covet the award, beautiful hand blown glass penguin made me wish I was a contestant. We judged that Linus got the definition of BogoMIPS wrong. Fortunately his still won, but it was truly joyous seeing the surprise on his face.
Are the RLCBSDG (Red Latex Clad BSD Girls)there?
And where are the pix of said RLCBSDG?
---
This
In fact, it's just a modified installer for RedHat 7.0 that allows you to install it on XFS.
There are similar installers that make it possible to install RedHat, Debian and even Slackware on ReiserFS. More details on freshmeat.net
In short, it's not a separate Linux distribution from SGI.
Trade shows are pointless.
They're like big slow in-person websites without text. The only real good thing about them is that companies give you free trinkets, and from what I gathered, it wasn't all that much, although I did get a fuzzy little penguin guy from Penguin Computing.
I did give perlmonks.org some donation money (which consisted of a pile of money on a table), though. So that was kind of good, but otherwise, the whole thing was pretty boring. Even the people involved seemed quite bored.
Your
Now I'm curious whether it is I or you missing the point here?
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
hmm if i understand it right *bsd ppl wont merge gpl code into their kernel (it would make whole kernel gpl) so i believe you are out of luck...
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Penguin awards ceremony and other webcasts from LW available here at Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast. Includes MP3s.
Shhhhhhh!
--
Liberty uber alles.
Um, bzzzt, wrong. SCO isn't pretty, or sexy, but they sell a LOT of licenses. They are a UNIX on Intel, and have a large business presence.
There servers have never been the most powerful (running on Intel Architecture, which until 2-3 years ago was seriously sucking compared to real Iron), but they have sold a lot of licenses.
The big Unix shops used to make a lot of money from licenses, but they were fewer licenses more $/license.
Not getting hype doesn't make you insignificant.
Hell, Solaris had limited presence in the Server room until the Internet boom, because their Hardware was considered substandard to IBM and HP stuff. However, they were a workstation player that gave their machines to engineering schools on the cheap, so people equated Sun with Unix.
Marketing gives the perception of marketshare, not the reality.
News.com has some video in RealVideo or Windows Media Player up now. They seem to be cutting over to a reporter live on the floor of the show, so I expect they'll be putting more up as they find their stories.
The slashdot stand looks kinda slick...
...j
About as racist as those fijians wanting Fiji just for them, when 40% of the population are Indians that helped them out in the early 1900s. Fuck you Fiji.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
SCO was hot 5-10 years ago. But since '95 or so they've been on the decline.
SCO sold licenses because there were all these various business tools that would only run on SCO.
About '96 or so most of these companies said "We're phasing out SCO in favor of X because it's easier/better/whatever".
Typically that X was Windows NT, sometimes it was Solaris.
I used to support an SCO ODT3 environment of about 8 workstations back in '93/'94.
But I agree with you in regards to Sun's popularity. Java also worked to their advantage, not necessarily as a language but as a marketing hype generator.
Sure they have. I used to work for a company that sold a delivery tracking package which ran on top of SCO Xenix 2.3 and SCO Unix 3.2. (Hail Eris!) But that company was purchased by a company which made a delivery tracking package running on Solaris, and the SCO offering was being phased out. All across the planet, this is the pattern; Ditch your legacy SCO-based solution for the latest greatest thing, because no one wants to develop new products on top of SCO Unix.
--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
GO TO THE WETLANDS in NYC, 160 Hudson St, great DnB/Jungle party for all you linux users out there. Peace.
I'm running it exclusively on my home workstation at this point, FWIW.
---
This is true; However, lots of code for *BSD has been created by "interpreting" code in linux. Mostly drivers, and not anything as ambitious as XFS that I'm aware of (though I'm probably wrong, and that's okay) but it can be done.
Alternately, I'd settle for any other truly journaling filesystem. FFS with softupdates is pretty good, but I want the whole thing.
--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because it takes more bandwidth and the same thing can be accomplished with a little javascript.
cat
phat eclectic nubile girls under incredible nylon
or if money is tight...
plump eskimo native girls undulating in nylon
---Oh man, you were SO hot... Damnit!
Stupid, ugly, BSD, revenge soon, take out on everyone, all sorry, sooo sorry.
---
This
Ahwell, the other two seem to be doing just fine.
- Ceren
FreeBSD's "Strange Attractor."
Here's an interesting basis for comparison: I lived through two similar blackouts, one in a company that had mostly Sun servers, another that had mostly SGI servers. No warning in either case (the Sun installation had its UPSs taken out by a massive power surge just before the blackout; the SGI installation didn't even have UPSs).
In addition to the no-power time, the Sun-based installtion lost a couple days doing filesystem repair on all its system. The SGI-based installtion was back almost as soon as the power came back! An XFS disk is really a kind of database. As such, it's always in a consistent state. Changes to the filesystem are akin to database transactions. An incomplete transaction doesn't leave you with a broken filesystem -- you just lose the transaction. I know less about NTFS and ReiserFS, but I gather they have similar features. It's worth noting that XFS and NTFS didn't have defrag utilities for a long time. It's not that those are hard to write, it's just that fragmentation is supposed to be impossible on journalling FSs. Not in the real world, it seems.
__________________
was unbearable :-)
Passing by the slashdot booth and the rest of the kieretsu, my sysadmin friend and I had to hold our noses.
C'mon guys! Take a bath!
Newsfollow.com
Anyone have a still photo of the thing?
I can't speak for performance (it feels fast, but I haven't used ext2 on the same hardware), but it feels pretty nice here. Install is currently a dump/restore affair, but I was building a new machine so just installed a base Debian system on a 150MB partition, copied over an XFS kernel, partitioned and then dumped stuff into the new root.
:)
I managed to nuke the primary superblock while attempting to install grub (I got my partition numbering confused), but thankfully there are recovery tools on SGI's website. It took about a minute to recover things from the secondary superblock. My only other problem was that 2.95 miscompiles the XFS code (you get long hangs during even moderately heavy file i/o), and I couldn't find any EGCS packages for Debian that didn't conflict with more recent ones. I ended up installing a gcc 2.97 snapshot and dropping back to 2.95 for the couple of files that gave me compiler errors. Still, it gives me a damn cool version string
Linux version 2.4.0-xfs (root@cavan) (gcc driver version 2.95.3 20010125 (prerelease) executing gcc version 2.97) #11 Wed Jan 31 11:41:20 GMT 2001
SGI are likely to promote Linux on their hardware. I don't see Irix being that long for the world in the lower-end workstation market based on a couple of conversations I've had with SGI people. If they port most of the useful features to Linux they get the advantage of a kernel that people will work on for free, letting them concentrate their efforts on the high-end multi-processor machines and media systems they make more money on.
most of the booths this year sucked. I'm not sure if it was just because it was the first day and not everyone was completely set up, but quite a few booths were nothing more than a few people sitting around. *cough*slashdot*cough*
Is there even a point to these people wasting space at the event? Should there be minimum requirements for a booth? Maybe it should at least have a presentation per day (and, no, PS2 doesn't count). I think some of the best were Covalents mostly Apache talk by Ryan Bloom and the linux.com-live kernel compile walkthrough. I'm not saying the rest sucked, I just didn't get a chance to see most. The debian booth was dissapointing, as was slashdot.
It also seemed most vendors were only interested in talking to you if you look like a potential customer. I can understand they do need to sell things and those are the most likely buyers, but when someone comes with questions, you don't just hand them the literature and send them off. The Intel, Covalent, Chiliware(oh yes) and Virtual Tek, LynxOS and SoftImage people were the most helpful people I talked to.
I don't mean to bash anyone (except slashdot), this was just my experience and I was pretty dissapointed.
bnoji bnoji@penguinpowered.com
This is only true if your filesystem was created with a 4Kb block size -- otherwise, you won't be able to do this.
This is great news!
Our research department made the decision to move from SGI Octanes at $30K a pop to cheap x86 boxes running Red Hat. Each SGI box has external storage between 8 GB and 36 GB.
Practical upshot: We can hang any disk attached to an SGI off a Red Hat 7 machine. Suddenly, our job of migrating from SGI to Linux just got a lot easier.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
Since IDG is the publisher of the 'Dummies' series, does that mean that 'The Samba folk' won what should be referred to as 'The Dummies Award'?
The joke about Perl Monks getting great donations is that they had a pile of nickels and dimes on the table in their booth with a sign marked donations.
But they did have cool stickers for your car or computer.
I was being serious! I love Linux and hate MS!
I'll be there in thirty minutes. Don't start without me.
Do not read this
Sounds like they're talking about tech support licenses for specific releases by specific companies.
Also it may be nice to be able to send people email with /. articles, or posts.
Lastly it would be nice if signatures could be longer.
Just my .02 cents. I only use this code here at /. .
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
--screw it I'm not going
---
This
Am I the only one who saw "Update: 02/01 05:18 PM by CT: " hours before 5:18 pm today? Taco got a time machine now?
Best Slashdot Co
You missed the real irony in this paragraph. See my quote. I live in Santa Cruz, and have been a member of the geek scene here (to some degree) for over a decade. Once-proud SCO has become what, now? Oh yes. A linux shop.
But in any case; Surpassing SCO is like kicking ass in a drag race against a Yugo.
--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So now, the not-linux-related question is, is anyone working on porting XFS to some flavor of BSD? I'll be more excited when I can install openbsd on XFS.
(Hey, I had to ask this question somewhere)
--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How much of a speed increase have you (or anyone else) noticed over ext2? Does anyone know how XFS compares to reiserfs or ext3? I'm not necessarily looking for hard-and-fast benchmarks -- just for "does it 'feel' faster"? (OTOH, if you had hard-and-fast benchmarks, that'd be great, too.) Is it a pain (i.e. dump/restore) to convert filesystems over to XFS, or have they come up with some cleverness to convert ext2 partitions?
Man that seems like a huge leap to me. Is XFS stable enough for production on Linux? I sure hope so because I would love to run some Linux Boxes running DB2 and Websphere on a XFS filesystem. I love ResierFS but from what I understand XFS blows away reiserFS when it comes to speed!
As I understand it, XFS is usually used in big-iron servers. I was wondering what its relevance was to smaller servers and workstation systems. I have seen that it has a very large code base, and a ton of features, so what are its memory/disk-space/performance characteristics. Is it slower/faster/about-the-same as ReiserFS, does it make your kernel huge or what? It seems that some people on this board have used XFS, so any insights would be appreciated.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Which makes me wonder: why don't browsers send timezone information in their headers, so that the servers can do the Right Thing(TM) with regard to displaying times?
E.g. my browser should send a header like this:
TimeZone: America/Chicago
or
TimeZone: CDT/-600
Then the SlashCode could appropriately display the time that the story was updated as "11:18 AM". (Assuming that the "5:18" refers to GMT.
It seems like a fundamental need for web-based applications. Why hasn't this been done?
--
But didn't Linux first *define* BogoMIPS?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well, if you didn't already have a licence, you could buy a car and start driving around. And start wearing a gun. And a trench coat. Then you could kidnap planes and act kamikaze-ish. Redmond would be your target. Good luck!
The officers are wearing commando sweaters with special NYPD patches on the shoulders
...and one of them was Robert Simone! I saw him! Someone tell Sipowicz!
Any chance that someone will post a good summary of what went on at the show?
Especially when slash has to post 3 articles in a row.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
I tossed some money onto the perlmonks table yesterday afternoon. To tell you the truth, the appearance of the two people at the table was the most encouraging factor. I guess by the time the second day rolled around, they were pretty tired. I felt so bad I didn't even pick up a sticker. Anyway, those guys do a great job; glad to hear they're doing well.
XFS has the ability to work with 512 peta-byte drives..
Thats a lot of pr0n.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
We are selling licences now? So this is how free software is going to make money: the software is free and free, but we sell the licences.
Eh, what would I DO with this licence I bought?Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)