ClusterKnoppix

chronicon writes "Knoppix is the ultimate live CD. No geek-kit should be without it. Now Wim Vandersmissen has taken it a step futher by adding openMosix functionality. Drop the clusterKnoppix CD in your "server", boot up... boot up some networked clients... Knoppix built in LTSP magic kicks in and ta-da--instant cluster!"

Comments

Imagine a

[Anonymous Coward]

... forget it.

Re:Imagine a

[jjeffries]

I thought you were taking the John Lennon approach there for a minute...

Instant cluster's gonna get you
Gonna knock you right on the head...

hehe

Re:Imagine a

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Why do I get the feeling that Knoppix is going to save the world someday?

Every day I find another use for Knoppix. I've re-built my own - with non re-distributable software, like X-Over plugins.

Re:Imagine a

[Jsprat23]

While the joke may be funny. :-P

There's actually a huge difference between a Beowulf cluster and what openMosix is doing. In a Beowulf cluster, the tasks are actually parallelized, where as in openMosix it sounds like the process is simply moved to the node that will complete it the fastest dynamically on the fly. For more info on Beowulf Clusters visit the Parallel Architecture Laboratory.

Adam

Hehe Neat

[Cybo2002]

Wow, This Is Pretty Cool. There Are Alot Of Possibilities Of Instant Networking Here. ALOT Of Possibilities.

Re:Hehe Neat

[rkz]

This is going to be great for quickly encoding DIVX movies in computer labs ;)

Re:Hehe Neat

[missing000]

hmM I don'T knoW abouT thaT, buT I likE youR usE oF capitalizatioN alittle.

Re:Hehe Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow The Way You Use Intial Caps Is Very Anoying. There Are A Lot O f P ossible W ays T o M ake I t M ore A noying T hough. Why Don't You Try Some?!

P.S: Using a monospace
font and putting in hard
line breaks as though
you're using a retarded
40 column web browser
is a very effective
way to
an
on
oy

t
o

o


!

Re:Hehe Neat

[rkz]

I wasnt trying to be funny I'm actually going to do this! It takes about 14 hours on a single windows machine right now (1Ghz AMDs). If I get 30 machines it should take little over half an hour to do a single movie. woo hoo

Re:Hehe Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

For backup purposes... right? ;)

Re:Hehe Neat

[Cybo2002]

Thank You Very Much :P

Re:Hehe Neat

[Cybo2002]

Shh, the RIAA are watching :D

Re:Hehe Neat

[kcurrie]

Do yo have an encoding program that will actaully break up the encoding to work on multiple CPUs? If not, you'll gain nothing.

Mosix works like a big SMP box, no special code is required, so you just fork and forget.

Re:Hehe Neat

[mmol_6453]

I can see the next press release now:

"They were using the equivalent of 16 PCs...er...nevermind."

Re:Hehe Neat

[rkz]

well I do actually.... GNU/Vidomi

Re:Hehe Neat

[Suidae]

Mosix works like a big SMP box, no special code is required, so you just fork and forget.

I can see that that would be extremely cool for processing, but (and excuse my ignorance here), how does this apply to things like network servers? Can I install apache on it and get the benefits of multiple servers without having to do any special configuration? What about database servers?

Re:Hehe Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to also look over Grendelsbane
http://nwst.de/livelinuxcd/
if you want a more server oriented setup.

Re:Hehe Neat

[gladbach]

since when does vidomi work on linux? I know it was talked about, but havent seen anything come to fruition yet...

Re:Hehe Neat

[zulux]

you're using a retarded
40 column web browser

HEY! MY TRS-80 COCO ONLY
HAS 32 COLUMNS - AND NO
LOWERCASE, YOU INSENSITIVE
CLOD!

Re:Hehe Neat

[petong]

I believe you will get benefits using mosix and apache. If the daemon spawns multiple processes, like apache does, then mosix can pass the child processes on to other boxes running mosix.

Re:Hehe Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

hes a troll read his journal

Re:Hehe Neat

[Realistic_Dragon]

It takes what now? My Athlon does three hours of DVD-Xvid (two pass) in just 3 hours, when running noting but the Linux kernel and the encoder.

Seems like your box might need the spyware, viruses and trojans cleaning off it :o)

Re:Hehe Neat

[rkz]

They are lab computers, probably full of spyware and 100's of cute systray icons!

Re:Hehe Neat

[korgull]

how about transcode ?

FTP Server shutdowned

[dimmu]

FTP Server seemed to be shutdown

Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!

[stanmann]

Ok, Kidding. I'm actually quite impressed with the wide support Knoppix provides for hardware and functionality. 5 years ago, the network computer theory was being trundled out, AGAIN. Now we have the capability for a truly functional dumb terminal/server configuration and it will run on any commodity hardware/software higher than a 486DX(allegedly). It ran well on my oddball Celeron 300 with a 640x480 monitor, although right now that is my only complaint with the various implementations of X...

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!

[GreyOrange]

Well, I'm quite impressed also. I've been looking for something this easy to deploy for demostration purposes, plus theres nothing like having a few dozen home computers at my house hooked up. Thanks slashdot for bringing this news to me!

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!

[Anonymous Coward]

there are instructions on how to build your own knoppix system in the docs... You simply edit the image. Mount up the ISO disk image and change it, then reburn.

If you don't like x, reconfigure it: ) I am not saying it is super easy or anything(if you are inexperienced), but it isn't impossible.

You could even change the pngs to say "stanmannix" if you want to impress your buddies (watch the licensing rules if you redistribute: )

l8,
ac

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!

[stanmann]

Its not that I do or don't like X, it is that KDE and Gnome both assume that you are running an 800x600 screen. and therefore certain options on large configuration windows aren't visible at 640x480, and I have been unable to discover how to adjust font/window settings to use it correctly, so that was more of an X rant than a KNOPPIX rant.

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!

[Gill Bates]

You can tell knoppix your screen res at boot-up. F2 will give a list of boot options one of which is 'screen=[whatever your screen res is]'

e.g., knoppix screen=1600x1200

works like a charm

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!

[stanmann]

and that fixes the problem of KDE configuration windows that are larger than the screen how??? Seriously, if someone can help me with a solution...

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!

[norweigiantroll]

Even easier. Knoppix comes with XFree86 4.3, so just run xrandr -s 1280x1024 (if I'm remembering that right) when in X.

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!

[he-sk]

Try moving the window in KDE with Alt-. This should work anywhere on the window area not just on the title bar.

This way, you at least have access to all the window content.

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster!!

[he-sk]

That should be Alt-

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

that is so beautiful it makes me want to cry... will it work if I do the knoppix-hd-install?

As if I needed another reason...

[mercan01]

I found out about OpenMosix recently, and I'd been looking for an excuse to test it out. This just makes it even easier.

I'm wondering how difficult it is to setup. Is it as easy as the poster made it sound?

Re:As if I needed another reason...

[1qa2ws3ed]

i didn't touch the keyboard. ten clicks with the mouse (i'm sure they where not more than ten...) and i was running a single system image cluster based on 3 diskless nodes... it is probably easyer to set it up than to explain what it can do. and it can do A LOT...

Re:As if I needed another reason...

[Chicane-UK]

I dont know how easy it'll be, but I like the sound of it over doing it from the ground up...

An IT lecturer in our college just came to me the other day.. he has recently discovered Linux (one must ask why it has taken him this long.. but at least he is making the effort), and is currently learning it and playing with it.

He recently saw information on Linux clustering, and seeing as his classroom is made up of 18 or so nice 1GHz+ pc's, he told me it was something he'd really like to try out. Whilst I thought it was a great idea, I was a little concerned at the amount of time it would take me to get up and running - let alone the amount of reading up i'd need to do.

Just reading this has made me realise it could be the answer to all my problems.. :)

Re:As if I needed another reason...

[Naito]

yeah, I have 2 rigs running RH 7.3 and RH8, downloaded a new kernel source and patched it with OpenMosix, install the kernel on both rigs, installed Mosix tools, and it was up and running. Couldn't possibly be simpler.

Instant Beowulf Cluster

[Anonymous Coward]

Just add water!

Re:Instant Beowulf Cluster

[lacrymology.com]

I did this... ... ..... .. . What's wrong with my computer?

Aaaaaaawwwwww yeeeeeaaaahhhhh....

[Anonymous Coward]

I just soiled myself with joy!

This is the problem with Linux

[FatAssBastard]

You have all these (admittedly talented) programmers spending all this
time on worthless projects when they should be spending time on
something worthwhile, like a consistent user interface, easy OS
install, or a decent media player.

Until the Linux Community learns this very important lesson, Linux will
continue to be relegated to second class citizen status to superior OS's
like Windows XP or MacOS X.

Awesome...

[Sh0t]

While I do admit knoppix is pretty cool and this is certainly one degree cooler, I have to admit I don't really see how useful this can be?

Re:Awesome...

[stanmann]

Well, think of an environment where you have boxen sitting around unused part of the time, and want to be able to plug and unplug cluster components dynamically and not have any persistent data stored on the part time cluster members, Possibly even using them for windows and word processing during the day and cracking the xbox key at night.

Re:Awesome...

[Anonymous Coward]

It gives the hardware geeks in my office an excuse to keep their 20 old grey boxes lying around for another few years, which in turn lowers central heating bills ;o)

Bernie ;o)

Say this three times fast

[Tuxinatorium]

Can cretans create clusterfuck of Clusterknoppixes?

Heh

[arvindn]

The author's got some really funny images on his site.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is hilarious too.

Re:Heh

[Some Bitch]

He could have linked back to El Reg or at least credited them.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

/. strikes again

Pop it in

[emo boy]

Pop in the cd and out pops an operating system with a crispy-crusty-tender-flaky crust.

mirrors needed!

[Anonymous Coward]

From here: mirrors are needed! please contact me

All I have to say is.. <voice actor="nelson">Ha ha!</voice>

Re:mirrors needed!

[Cond0r]

http://condor.madoka.be/clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-0 5-20-EN-cl1.iso.torrent

Re:mirrors needed!

[Cond0r]

http://condor.madoka.be/clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-0 5-20-EN-cl1.iso.torrent , without the space...

Re:mirrors needed!

[Cond0r]

aaargh! I'll kill my damn browser :-) http://condor.madoka.be/clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-0 5-20-EN-cl1.iso

Re:mirrors needed!

[NTworks]

http://condor.madoka.be/clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-0 5-20-EN-cl1.iso

Re:mirrors needed!

[Anonymous Coward]

doh! forgot the .torrent.

doesnt matter anyway cuz the torrent aint there

Re:mirrors needed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your .torrent file doesn't seem well configured....

Interesting...

[Flabby Boohoo]

"Knoppix is the ultimate live CD"

That's what they said about "Peter Framptom Comes Live" too.

There can only be one ultimate!

Re:Interesting...

[lacrymology.com]

"... it depends on how you define 'IS'." nuff said.

Re:Interesting...

[goosman]

The Knoppix is of course the penultimate....

Do you feel?

Re:Interesting...

[micromoog]

Must nit-pick . . . it's "Frampton Comes Alive".

<Wayne>Exqueese me? Have I seen this one before? Frampton Comes alive? Everybody's got Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of "Tide".</Wayne>

Re:Interesting...

[Flabby Boohoo]

Well, it would not be Slashdot if someone was'nt bit-picking! :-)

Terminals vs Licenses

[vaseyandco]

Does that mean now I'm going to get sued for every terminal client now, as well as ever server? Damn I'd start saving. Or get a job at Novell.

clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

clusterKnoppix is in desperate need of mirrors. here's one (but i urge you all to make a .torrent or something):
http://www.openmosixview.com/clusterk noppix/

for a crappy yet less bloaty altenative, check out PlumpOS: http://plumpos.sourceforge.net/

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[gladbach]

yes, torrent please. Websites of this nature should get smart and just start providing their own bittorrent links, and throw up a few volunteer seeds.

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[Mr. McGibby]

How about a non-copyright-infringing make-your-own-torrent web site? I'm sure it wouldn't get the bandwidth load that the other torrent sites. Then random people on slashdot could actually just do this themselves and post a comment with a torrent link.

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[caino59]

that is a wonderfull idea.

bestoy this man with mod points...

(and go patent the idea while he checks his karma) ;o)

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

bestoy?

bestow.

oops.

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[gladbach]

this site used to host bittorrents for slashdot stuff, but haven't seen anything there in a while... used to have 6 or so downloads from recent /. stuff.

http://207.44.142.96/

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the FAQ, Jack. Slashdot doesn't need no steenkin' caching. By extension, torrents, either!

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[digidave]

What we really need is an HTTP torrent-like technology, so when you hit a site that's being slashdotted, you transparently download it from everybody else who's there.

That sure puts IBM's e-business on demand to shame.

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[SwellJoe]

(and go patent the idea while he checks his karma)

There is prior art. There are at least three pseudo-spy-ware companies that do this. I will not name them, since I'd rather they disappear into oblivion. An Open Source solution to do this would be awesome, of course.

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a site made for exactly this purpose:

http://f.scarywater.net/

A very interesting graph here from when they put out the Redhat 9 ISOs.

Still, it generates an insane amount of traffic.

Though, I'm not sure if they are doing seeding themselves as well, that might contribute to that traffic...

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[Mr. McGibby]

Except I can't upload my own torrent, nor does it provide a page for newbies on how to create one. This is what made some of the big torrent sites so popular. Users didn't depend on some l33t webmaster to seed everything. All the users could contribute. That's exactly the problem with scarywater. Unless the webmaster is on top of things, beats the slashdot effect to get the file (which is needed for seeding), and does it in reasonable amount of time, it's worthless.

We need something big enough that at some point it gets mentioned in the FAQ.

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it is obvious that bittorrent is a great new technology with a compelling use. This is the kind of this that can set open source apart from the Microsoft's of the world. We should build a non-bloated, speedy bittorrent module for mozilla that integrates all bittorrent functionality into the browser. A built-in bittorrent manager would be a great help too. Let's get this into Mozilla right away and we'll show Microsoft that IE is just yesterday's browser!

Re:Come on, I know you're out there

[gladbach]

LOL. the funny thing is, he's right. Gentoo IS THE BEST DISTRO EVAR. but, knoppix is neat all by itself.

The name needs adjustment

[fudgefactor7]

"OpenMosixKnoppix didn't quite sound good, so I called it ClusterKnoppix ;)"

I would have chosen Kloppix...the "l" for cluster, the rest is self-explanitory.

Re:The name needs adjustment

[Repugnant_Shit]

And if your cluster gets a virus, you could call it Klappix

Re:The name needs adjustment

[rwsorden]

In order to please Mr. Stallman, I suggest GNU/Linux/KDE/ClusterKnoppix .

Re:The name needs adjustment

[Anonymous Coward]

Stallman is a fucktard. He can kiss my ass.

Re:The name needs adjustment

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be Cobalt blue instead of brown?

Re:The name needs adjustment

[Cruciform]

But the clap is bacterial, so you might have to settle for something like Herpix instead :)

Minimum hardware?

[wlj]

What is the minimum hardware needed to support this? Obviously a NIC, but can it run diskless (no HDD or CD)?

That suddenly makes for a VERY cheap grid node. (Didn't want to use the "B" word :-)

Re:Minimum hardware?

[1qa2ws3ed]

yes

Re:Minimum hardware?

[stanmann]

From Knoppix.org What are the minimum system requirements?

Intel-compatible CPU (i486 or later),
20 MB of RAM for text mode, at least 96 MB for graphics mode with KDE (at least 128 MB of RAM is recommended to use the various office products),
bootable CD-ROM drive,
or a boot floppy and standard CD-ROM (IDE/ATAPI or SCSI),
standard SVGA-compatible graphics card,
serial or PS/2 standard mouse or IMPS/2-compatible USB-mouse.
And for graphics mode, you need a monitor that will support 800x600 for reasonable performance. it will run at 640x480, but feels cramped.

Re:Minimum hardware?

[realdpk]

That doesn't mention a NIC - I assume that's for the standalone version?

Re:Minimum hardware?

[Stonent1]

I wrote an article on the Knoppix.net site on how to make a normal Redhat system into a knoppix boot server. http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=229&h ighlight=tftpd

bittorrent

[parkanoid]

Bittorrents going up in ~20 mintes, stand by.

Re:bittorrent

[Cond0r]

Right here: http://condor.madoka.be/clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-0 5-20-EN-cl1.iso.torrent

Re:bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

no it's not. i get file not found

Re:bittorrent

[TheFlyingGoat]

There's a space in the link. Remove the space, or the %20 if your browser put that in.

Re:bittorrent

[parkanoid]

Working link here: clicky

Re:bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

pardon the ignorance but why not use the edonkey protocol for example? all you need is to publish the file size and the md4 hash or an ed2k link directly in a post. this need to host separate .torrent files seems suboptimal?

edonkey provides distributed downloading as well.

just asking

Re:bittorrent

[Cond0r]

Indeed, a damn space, here's the correct link: http://condor.madoka.be/clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-0 5-20-EN-cl1.iso.torrent Hope its correct this time :)

Re:bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

what the.. now that i actually download the .torrent file i see it's >50K in size. compare this to ~10 bytes for size and 32 bytes hash at minimum. why the bittorrent hype?

same AC as parent

Re:bittorrent

[Latent IT]

Give up yet? =p

Re:bittorrent

[parkanoid]

edonkey is slow, unlreliable, does not scale well and relies on third-party hubs. Bittorrent is under control by the author and builds speed rapidly with increased number of users.

Re: Bittorrent

[benjamindees]

I'm currently using a distributed network protocol designed to easily share bandwidth in order to download an operating system designed to easily share processing power.

This is quite possibly the coolest thing I've seen happen in computing in the last ten years, all thanks to Open Source.

Microsoft innovation my ass.

Re:bittorrent

[azimir]

Nope.

Spiking over 150K/s and loving it.

Maybe I'll check it out in the PC lab this weekend.

BitTorrent does penalize you heavily for not uploading properly. Sorry if that is inconvenient for you. :-)

1 real-world IP from the ISP and loving it!

Re:bittorrent

[Latent IT]

Um... I was referring to his link constantly getting chunked by the lameness filter. What are you talking about?

Re:Beuwolf

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this shit deserve to be 3? Not only is it a shitty played out joke, but he's not even the first one to make it for this post. Fucking idiot moderators.

Applications I could run?

[gpinzone]

What applications can I run right away if I burn a bunch of these and boot up a few of the machines on my network? Do I have to configure IP addresses? Does it assume I have DHCP installed? Which Linux programs will automatically benefit from the cluster?

Re:Applications I could run?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not too many 'common' apps, but things like PVM PovRay, make, various CD ripping/video processing utilities. There is a list on OpenMOSIX.org

With the experimental DSM patches being developed, Apache even runs, but most things like databases and web servers generally don't because they depend on shared memory to work, and shared memory on a cluster is a difficult thing to provide if oyu want any kind of performance.

Re:Applications I could run?

[Bobzibub]

Open Mosix would allow the migration of regular processes, not specially written parallel programs which are required for Beowulf varieties. With Open Mosix you can run 50 instances of what-ever program.

I think it won't be long before we have an insta-Apache cluster, insta-mySQL cluster, insta redHat ecomm application cluster... I don't think Oracle's unbreakable claims hold a candle to this:

It is very exciting. (well I dig it!) But not simply because you can use your Mamma's Windoze network without her knowing: Say a bunch of machines in an e-commerce configuration insta-cluster, each with a couple gigs of ram and a cdrom (or even network boot). This makes it extremely unlikely that an unstable node wouldn't be able to get up on its feet again if it was rebooted or simply crashed. It is much more likely that your traditional installed OS will go AWOL and pooch your hard drive, making it unusable w/o a re-install. This time, every boot is a fresh install. Your data is the only thing that is written to storage. Maybe to a SAN via an mySQL cluster?

Also if a node is mis-behav'n then you can tell the processes to get lost (move onto other nodes) reboot the machine w/o worrying about the stability of the installation. Have your script reboot each node weekly in staggered times during low volume times just for the hell of it!

You could always use diskless nodes 'n stuff but this way it will be brought to the starving masses. Much less administration. Much more turnkey. Much more scary for Redmond based software companies (Lycoris excepted) because this sort of thing beats traditional point and click.
-b

Arghhh

[Usquebaugh]

Do not use MOSIX in a HA cluster. MOSIX is great for HP situations but for a terminal server, arghh

Re:Arghhh

[1qa2ws3ed]

1) this is not mosix (but the target is the same) 2) this is an HP setup. clients are run in textmode only, only eventually with a full blown kde to use it as also as a terminal server. you choose.

Re:Arghhh

[Master Bait]

I've been wondering what kind of latency MOSIX gives when it moves an X client over to another machine. Can you describe what it feels like for the user?

Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

a beowulf cluster of... BEOWULF CLUSTERS!!!

I think they should provide a way of installing it to a hard drive, for people like me who like to go dumpster diving for old 500MB-1.2GB hdd's.

Re:Imagine...

[1qa2ws3ed]

afaik it is installable, but you need a bit more space, about 2gb. speaking of beowulf cluster of beowulf cluster, in clusterknoppix there is bochs (and it can migrate through nodes), so maybe you could run clusterknoppix recursively into itself...

Re:Imagine...

[DeltaSigma]

...and just like a light bulb powering itself illuminating the surface of an attached photovoltaic cell, you'll get more processing power with knoppix clustering with knoppix inside of virtual machines... ...Someone had to say it!

Re:BitTorrent = SHIT and still not legal anyway

[jonathan_ingram]

You know BitTorrent's not an illegal file sharing tool, but anyway -- if you think 2k down / 25k up's bad, you've obviously never used eDonkey/eMule! When you're trying to download something, and the lowest queue position you're in is 400, you'll learn to appreciate BitTorrent.

I should give this a shot

[zakezuke]

I have here a compaq contura Aero 486 sx/33 with 4megs of ram and a 170 meg HD. I find that Caldara, while being one of the only things that will run on it, is a might bit slugish.

The contura Aero is particulary annoying because of it's use of a Pcmcia floppy drive, and only 1 type II slot. For those unfamilar, it's not like you can hot swap the floppy and have it still work or anything useful like that.

For me it's either the laptop or a old net terminal for telnet fuctionality, and the laptop takes up less space.

Re:I should give this a shot

[stanmann]

you might do better with one of the roll your own distros, Gentoo, Sourcemage, etc. especially if all you need is a text terminal... you could probably even get something that would fit on a floppy as in kernal and terminal software.

Re:I should give this a shot

[arcadum]

Install an old version of Slakware and your machine should work well.

Set up a Torrent!

[mmol_6453]

Um...this is probably obvious, but why doesn't someone set up a Torrent?

Re:Come on, I know you're out there

[Schezar]

Gentoo IS THE BEST DISTRO EVAR

The best distro ever is functional AND simple to install.

SIMPLE to INSTALL.

hmmm. game servers?

[gladbach]

I dont know enough about open mosix, but would this concievably work for game servers? Problems I forsee would be the issue of the servers needing to bind to ips, and secondly, the server process switching nodes and lagging like hell.

anyone know enough to talk about this?

ObVMSPost

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, instant cluster set-up, does it come with a graphical wizard and all?

Linux must stop trying to be like Windows. The lack of Unix sysadmins that made dumbed-down Windows NT the choice for small businesses in the mid-90s is no longer a problem, and companies need only worry about functionality rather than whether their sysadmin is competent enough to set up by any other method than point-and-click (or fit-and-forget).

Linux's enterprise respectability (and I mean real enterprise, not 20-employee small office) would come from "innovating" from such systems as VMS, not Windows.

Re:ObVMSPost

[Hypocritical Guy]

Yeah, lets keep Linux difficult to use, so that no one will use it. And people who do use it can act elite...

Re:ObVMSPost

[Anonymous Coward]

You appear to be confusing "difficult" with "requires a competent sysadmin". There is never any need to build an "idiot-proof" server, in the same way that there's no worth in trying to making it easier for someone to become a fully trained doctor after reading Teach Yourself Orthopaedic Surgery In 21 Days.

When software is built to be totally "idiot proof", only idiots use it.

Re:ObVMSPost

[TrekkieGod]

Linux must stop trying to be like Windows.

Yeah, exactly. If I want an instant cluster, I can just boot my server off my WindowsXP cd, thank you very much.

Re:ObVMSPost

[King_TJ]

So wait a minute, are you saying Microsoft Windows is the only environment that does (or should) offer "ease of use"?

If that's your belief, I think you're crazy.

Re:ObVMSPost

[Hypocritical Guy]

You seem to be confusing "requires a competant sysadmin" with "difficult." Your doctor example does not apply, as there are morals involved in that case (fuck up an operation, you can kill someone). Making Linux easier to use (I'm not talking about idiot-proof) means more people using it. With this software, now more people can cluster their machines with very little effort. What is the harm in that?

Re:ObVMSPost

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, ok, sorry. 1) Computers are never used in life or death situations. 2) Unless something is life threatening, it doesn't matter how badly it's done. Forgot these 2 important assumptions. Thanks for reminding me.

Re:ObVMSPost

[Hypocritical Guy]

2) Unless something is life threatening, it doesn't matter how badly it's done.

Easy to use != badly done

Difficult to use != done well

Re:ObVMSPost

[Anonymous Coward]

You're making an irrelevant point. You were trying to invalidate the doctor analogy on the basis of doctors' jobs being more "life or death" than sysadmins. I am arguing that there is no advantage in a culture of point-and-click admins, so there is no advantage in adding features which merely hold the hand of the less clued up sysadmin, but do not do much else.

If anything but Instant On (with no manual reading required) is your idea of "difficult", perhaps it's time to change your approach to learning, or change fields completely?

Re:ObVMSPost

[Hypocritical Guy]

Fine then, if you can make surgery easy to the point where no one could possibly screw it up, then people should be able to just click a button and have their surgery completed.

My point is to eliminate the doctor or the sysadmin in environments where it isn't necessary. I am saying the end user should be able to do things that the sysadmins have been doing. The whole point is to speed up the process. If you have an admin he should be able to do more in less time.

Have you been paying attention to software development? It's gotten a lot easier in the last two decades (though in some ways more complicated). Which also means it is a lot faster. Sure there are your clueless who are putting out bad code, but it wouldn't be any better if software development was difficult.

The barrier to entry does not make for better skills. You'll still have the lazy idiots.

If anything but Instant On (with no manual reading required) is your idea of "difficult", perhaps it's time to change your approach to learning, or change fields completely?

Funny.. I was one of those elitist pricks like you, who was against computers getting easier to use. I argued the exact same point from your side (I still dislike point-and-click as much as the next guy). But that was when I was 16 years old. But I grew out of that. I personally have no problem with computers remaining difficult, but I think this attitude that they should remain difficult is just the typical elitism found in people who do have the experience.

Making things easier saves time, plain and simple. I'm for advancement in the computer field, not holding it back. What would you rather do? Synthesize an FPGA from VHDL? Or design the whole thing by hand using only the simplest logic gates? Oh sorry, VHDL is too easy to use. In order to be elite I have to do it the hard way. Nevermind that deadline I have, it can wait, my company can lose money.. Hell, I'll hand-optimize the whole thing myself, just so I can feel like I'm smart.

Re:ObVMSPost

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine then, if you can make surgery easy to the point where no one could possibly screw it up, then people should be able to just click a button and have their surgery completed.

That's the lie that Microsoft has been selling to its computer-illiterate users with NT for a decade. "So easy, you couldn't possibly screw it up!" Giving us incompetent sysadmins, giving us an exploit of the week. Or maybe this is the unique software package among every single one ever written which actually delivers on the "so easy, it requires no skills to set up properly" promise?

Have you been paying attention to software development? It's gotten a lot easier in the last two decades

On the contrary, it's got a lot more complicated because every vendor and his mother is trying to sell something to make it "easier", and people are buying into every one, all chasing the ideal of programming that's "so easy, even an idiot could do it".

The barrier to entry does not make for better skills. You'll still have the lazy idiots.

How exactly does a lazy idiot get to pretend he can administrate a text-console Unix system? Now watch any lazy idiot pretending he knows how to get things working on an NT box.

I think this attitude that they should remain difficult is just the typical elitism found in people who do have the experience.

Funny thing is, I don't find Unix "hard" compared to Windows, and I never have (and I've never met anyone who does). It requires more learning, sure -- more initial effort to get to grips with -- but actually using it is a lot easier once you've got past that hurdle. The Unix philosophy is a lot simpler than the Windows one, with a simpler architecture to match.

The only man who argues that Unix is harder is one who has steadfastly refused to make the modicum of effort required to understand it.

What would you rather do? Synthesize an FPGA from VHDL? Or design the whole thing by hand using only the simplest logic gates?

Irrelevant. How about, "What would you rather do, synthesize an FPGA from VHDL? Or have a one-click CPU generation wizard, where any newbie can create and market the AnonymousCoward86 CPU?" Well, I'm no fascist, and have no problem allowing people to do that if they really want, but all you'll get is a flood of substandard CPUs in the marketplace, which all overheat, explode, or simply don't work to spec in the first place.

Re:BitTorrent = SHIT and still not legal anyway

[grub]

Get the eMule source and hack out the upload crap. Have it generate a new user ID every run so you don't get a bad rating, you just stay as a "newer user". I always get ~150KB/sec in with 0K out. While you're at it, increase your search connections/sec.. There's LOTS you can do...

Re:SCO is tanking hard again!

[twocents]

Gosh, I can't imagine people that had invested millions in Linux becoming angry that SCO is threatening to sue Linus and thinking twice about buying their stock and their services.

Most people dumped their software years ago, so hopefully everyone will now finish them off and dump their stock.

Limitations?

[mmol_6453]

This will be an interesting study? How useful will multiple independant bittorrents be?

If you have multiple Torrent servers/trackers, won't you be limiting the available bandwitdth?

Re:Limitations?

[parkanoid]

That's why I posted a warning ahead of time, so that others would not bother setting up separate torrents.

OK, really dumb question here...

[gosand]

From the page:
"openMosix terminal server" - uses PXE, DHCP and tftp to boot linux clients via the network. No CDrom drive/harddisk/floppy needed for the clients

How do the clients work if no CDrom/HD/Floppy is needed? I am trying to wrap my brain around this one. I get the cluster server idea, but then does the server determine which clients on the network will boot into the cluster? Is it via DHCP? Doesn't there need to be *something* on the client side like a HD/floppy/CDrom so it can boot?

Re:OK, really dumb question here...

[SnowDeath]

Good reverend, you should search for PXE info - it is basically a chip on a network card that can basically "boot" to the network...it seaches for DHCP, BOOTP, etc and blah blah blah :)

Re:OK, really dumb question here...

[SharpFang]

The network card has just enough of simple BIOS to grab some necessary info from the net - first a simple bootup code, then the kernel, then mount the network drives... Everything kept in RAM. Few modern network cards support this, but if you see an empty chip socket on a network card, it's most probable it's place for the boot code EEPROM.

Re:OK, really dumb question here...

[1qa2ws3ed]

they mount the root filesystem entirely over the lan from another machine. i have 2 machines at home that works without hdd, cdrom and floppy disk. your network card must support pxe boot, and the server must be configured rigth with dhcp or other ways. if your network card can't boot from the lan you will need at least a floppy (or a cdrom) to make the system boot.

Re:OK, really dumb question here...

[1qa2ws3ed]

> Everything kept in RAM.
not necessarily, everything kept on the server...

Re:OK, really dumb question here...

[jhealy1024]

PXE describes a method where the NIC in the computer bootstraps the information it needs to boot off of the network. Many modern computers have NICs that support this. Newworld Macintoshes can netboot, as can most recent 3com cards (even my 3 year old Dell supports it).

Basically, the NIC makes a DHCP (or BOOTP) request for an IP address. The DHCP protocol allows the server to return the address of a TFTP (Trivial FTP) server along with the IP address for the client. The client contacts the TFTP server to get a kernel (vmlinuz), and then boots directly into that. From there, the kernel should be configured to mount its filesystems over NFS, and finish the boot process. I'm sure Google can point you to a more complete explanation.

What makes ClusterKnoppix so cool is that it's usually a huge pain to set up a TFTP/DHCP/NFS server correctly for multiple clients. ClusterKnoppix does it all for you, so all you need are some (really) "dumb" clients and all the heavy lifting is done for you.

Re:OK, really dumb question here...

[Master Bait]

It seems also that just about any motherboard with built-in ethernet has a PXE boot rom included.

Re:OK, really dumb question here...

[gosand]

Good reverend, you should search for PXE info - it is basically a chip on a network card that can basically "boot" to the network...it seaches for DHCP, BOOTP, etc and blah blah blah :)

OK, based on this, it kind of makes sense. But stating "it uses PXE, DHCP, etc etc" isn't much of an indication on how it works. Based on your (and others) response, it can be explained in a sentence or two. I have been using Linux for 5 years now, and have never heard of PXE. In such a diverse and fast-moving world as OSS, sometimes simple explanations can clear up a world of confusion.

And why was my post modded up as Funny? I don't get it.

Re:OK, really dumb question here...

[platos_beard]

Look it up on ltsp.org. I just got Suse+ltsp going (openmosix is next) and it was easier than I expected.

With a system supporting Preboot eXecution Environment:

computer powers on
PXE looks for DHCP
DHCP sends etherboot stub
computer loads etherboot
Etherboot looks for DHCP server
DHCP sends linux kernel
computer loads linux

kernel is configured and patched to do everything, including swap, from nfs share. local disk needed, just CPU and RAM.

Re:Come on, I know you're out there

[DeltaSigma]

So that's a "no" to Debian?

Hmph, now I wish Debian had a mascot so that I could claim you made him cry.

It should speed up my SETI@home contributions

[silviuc]

I'm expecting big speedups for my SETI@home work. Now lemme get my hands on those ISOs...

Re:It should speed up my SETI@home contributions

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, just make sure you're the person that closes up the PC lab every night! == big SETI@home score!

Re:It should speed up my SETI@home contributions

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually your seti scores probably wont increase much. Seti is already parralellized(is that even a word? lol). Being on a cluster probably wont help much since its already broken down into units. Each node will just do a seperate work unit. Programs in a cluster are usually programmed specifically to take advantage of the extra nodes.... then again I could be waaaaay

Re:It should speed up my SETI@home contributions

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Setiathome isn't multi-threaded so one instance of the application will run on one processor. You would need to run multiple instances of setiathome and have them migrate to other nodes (this is what I do)

Re:Come on, I know you're out there

[Anonymous Coward]

i hear he brought a tear to the swirly thing's eye...

really needs to be said

[b17bmbr]

this is truly remarkable and only could be done in an open source envronment. it is projects liek this that clearly show that it is only a matter of time before we look back and go "micro who?". forget the billions in the bank, the fud, the monopoly, etc., could they really do something like this? and when the cat is finally, really out of the bag, about the quality of F/OSS, it will be amazing.

Re:really needs to be said

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 Preaching to the Choir.

Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been reading all about openmosix, and I think it's neat and all, but.. What can it do?

Besides the little simulation programs they have to test it. List some tasks it could be used for in a typical sort of home network with a half dozen nodes..

Re:Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

mosix is a piece of shit that can't do anything worthwhile. if you want to run a cluster, use debian, MPI, OpenPBS and Maui. done.

IT/Clustering made cheap

[mmol_6453]

Linux Magazine just did a three-article bonanza on how Beowulf clusters came about, and the costs and issues involved with running one.

This could blow all of that away; Just insert the CD in all of the machines in your office, and let fly. Air conditioning? Already accounted for. Power consumption? Not much more than usual. Floorspace? Just a little under everyone's desk.

What I'd like to see would be companies switching over to all-Linux or mostly-Linux shops, running all their machines as an OpenMosix cluster. They could sell off their spare CPU cycles, quite easily. Ironically, IT's never been so cheap.

Re:IT/Clustering made cheap

[Ed Avis]

Can people still log in and do their work while the cluster is running jobs?

Re:IT/Clustering made cheap

[mmol_6453]

Yup. OpenMOSIX doesn't do anything to interfere with userland activities.

Re:hmmm. game servers?

[1qa2ws3ed]

one example: http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/#Documentation the last one.

Hmmm....

[SharpFang]

Start a cluster of these with some profitable computations at work in the evening, using every worker's own PC, then come in first in the morning to remove all evidences quickly and painlessly... (or even watch over that all during your graveyard shift as a sysadmin)... Instant cluster - that's clever.

Did You Say

[Anonymous Coward]

CLUSTER?

A much better name

[Mr_Perl]

From the site

OpenMosixKnoppix didn't quite sound good, so I called it ClusterKnoppix ;)

I would propose the moniker "Cloppix"

Brings to mind images of a certain powerful one eyed giant...

Re:A much better name

[Anonymous Coward]

well, at least you changed one letter

Re:A much better name

[trippyd]

is it me or does Cloppix sound like a STD?

Easy bake clusters

[aardwolf204]

Sounds like it will fit perfectly next to my easy bake oven...

'1 tablespoon Knoppix, 3 lbs unprocessed x86 hardware'

Re:SCO is tanking hard again!

[Anonymous Coward]

And here, in pictures for extra funny effect is their stock taking a nosedive after Novell chimed in....

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCOX&d=c&t=5d&l=on&z= m&q=l

Ha Ha Ha

Mods please moderate down

[imsabbel]

Noone should read his shit

Re:Mods please moderate down

[Anonymous Coward]

you shutup

Re:Mods please moderate down

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut your mouth, you AC dork.

Knoppix

[ajs318]

has replaced tomsrtbt as my rescue tool of choice.

It probably would have done so even if any of my latest machines had a floppy drive ..... what these people have managed to pull off is fantastic.

Can ClusterKnoppix clients boot from the CD?

[Anonymous Coward]

instead of the ethernet ROM?

Re:Can ClusterKnoppix clients boot from the CD?

[1qa2ws3ed]

yes. and probably from a floppy too.

So, where is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, come on... I'm getting antsy

Re:Come on, I know you're out there

[mark_lybarger]

you obviously know what you're talking about. gentoo is NOT easy to install and maintainence is a beeetch. i've commonly had systems become so flubergusted that they won't boot after a simple emerge -u world. glibc problems. even booting in restore mode (from chrooted via cdrom), wouldn't let me fix it except to untar the stages again. that of course was basically a reinstall.

oh sure, it's still 1.4b as in beta, but at this rate it'll become debian status. also, i don't think the 1.4b really holds much water now because as i understand using the 1.2 boot cd and installing a fresh system will give you a current system with all the packages (bugs included).

gentoo is a great distro in dire need of maturity and lots more package maintainers. an installer for gentoo causes quite the discussion on the irc and on the forums. most gentooers for some strange reason are against an installer completely. their reasoning is that you don't get your hands dirty enough using a simplified installer. no need to learn fdisk commands or how to format a ext3 partition, or how to mount a swap disk, or how to create/edit (using the nano editor) a /etc/fstab file, or how to ... do 20 other steps that must be done in the right order that you'll never need to know in day to day use.

I really want to understand...

[JesterOne]

Everyone is talking about how cool this is and how well it runs but what would I use this for in the real world (even the 'fake' world). So, I have a network by day, cluster by night. What am I going to run on it? I mean folding proteins in realtime may be cool to some but, come on... I really would like to understand (I'm an MCSE running all MSFT except one server - finance server is running RedHat). Someone explain this to me (linux avocates - this is your chance)...

Re:I really want to understand...

[stratjakt]

It works like a big SMP box, but if something is bound to a local HDD (like a webserver or database) it will run on that node.

So I'm wondering if it could spread something like squid and dansguardian out?

I'm not sure.

The closest thing to something I could actually use it for would be encoding video/audio faster. You know, for fair use backup purposes. If I could find a good multiprocess encoder that can do various different formats that I want to encode, including lots of esoteric ones like bink (for downsizing my fair use PS2 and XBox "backups")

Another question for those with more experience: do all the "nodes" still act as normal workstations? Like if I compiled openmosix support into the various linux boxes I have doing different tasks (a couple of samba servers, print servers, etc), will they still be the machines they are, or do they become one big machine?

Re:I really want to understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to do a lot of computing work, this is a good way. You say you don't want to do a lot of computing work. Therefore, this provides you with nothing.

By analogy, if I wanted to run a Microsoft shop you'd be a good person to hire. Since I don't want to run such a shop, you're utterly useless.

Re:I really want to understand...

[b17bmbr]

I'm an MCSE running all MSFT...

sorry to hear that. but really, it isn't "what can i do with this", it is simply, "i can do this". it's like an education, what you do with it is your business, but you have an education and you are able to do so much more. and in fact, try to do this with your msft boxes. it can't be done. because they tell you what you can and can't do. period.

Re:I really want to understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Word processing is the most computationally complex thing those MCSEs can think of.

Re:I really want to understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

A more capable file server. However this does have its limitations as (open)Mosix causes all syscalls to be sent over the network back to the server, meaning that the speed of the server's disks and the network become a limitation very quickly.

A terminal server so lots of people can login and run xsessions (excactly what LTSP does) or ssh/telnet sessions.

If you want to do any work with video processing it can get very slow to apply even the simplest effects to a couple hours of video.

Plenty of CPU intensive scientific applications.

Break cryptography.

Testing your own cryptography.

Making your everyday desktop applications run faster, some of the processing you can do in GIMP might benefit from a few extra CPUs to run on. Of course SMP is faster, but this lets you use spare machines up.

OpenMosix probably isn't an approrpate environment to run seti and clones in, as you set off your process going on the server node, it then fails over to another idle node which then has to communicate back to the server to send the data back to the external seti server.

For this a cluster where you just login to each node and kick off a process would be more appropriate, although from the looks of it, this can do that too.

Re:I really want to understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mosix causes process to be migrated from one machine to another (like SMP kernels do). Each node can act like a normal workstation but could end up migrating processes to others. So you could start samba on each and if any one of them got overloaded it would migrate to other systems. However you could just run one samba server and it would migrate (when nessecary) to other nodes in order to cope with the load.

Re:I really want to understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

See, this I dont understand. How are resources shared?

My main samba fileserver (ARNOLD) (also my PDC) has two 80 gig drives in it. Its filled up with all kinds of stuff, tv captures (kind of a distributed tivo), etc. Another samba box (WILLIS) has only a 7.5 gig HDD, but is my print server. Another (GOOCH) has 20 gigs of nintendo roms, mostly.

So if I send a print job to WILLIS, and the job gets migrated to GOOCH, how does GOOCH print? Or if I request a 9 gig video file off of ARNOLD, which gets migrated to WILLIS, which cant hold the file...

So instead of client server I have client - some other machine - some other machine - server. So as far as distributing samba, and other services, it sounds kind of pointless.

I guess postscript filtering for print jobs could be helped by migrating.

Re:I really want to understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anywhere you have any requirement for lots of CPU power without the requirement for fast I/O, is a potential area that can benefit.

This is only news because it's in Knoppix, not in some lesser known OpenMOSIX distro like PlumpOS.

Major areas that will benefit from this type of clustering are:

video/audio transcoding
3D rendering
batch transactions e.g. billing
encryption cracking
simulation and visualisation

amongst others

To give an example - lets say you had a 'what-if' scenario, where you had money to invest and wanted to find out the best way to invest that money, whether the markets went up, down or otherwise.

you might have simulations of several market trends, and a large number of stocks, with, say a set of 10, you wanted to invest in.

To analyse this, you need to do a huge number of calculations. You would generate each possible combination of 10 stocks, and run each through your 'market rising, market lowering, market flat' simulations (this is a simplification).

Now, with a single computer, this could take a long time to process, but if you can make different computers process each set of 10 stocks in parallel, you can save a lot of time.

And OpenMOSIX allows you to code this app without worrying about the fact it will eventually run on a cluster. You just run lots of instances of it, and those instances will transparently migrate across the cluster.

It has only been recently that there has been a really practical clustering solution for the desktop, and it has just got even more practical with this new Knoppix variant.

Hope that helps you to understand what OpenMOSIX can do.

Also, the availability of such a clustering solution will stimulate the availability of apps that can take advantage of it.

Don't worry if you can't see a point for it right now.
There will be a killer app for you, You don't need to be in a hurry to adopt Linux.

We will eventually give you a reason that makes total sense :)

Re:I really want to understand...

[Viking Coder]

folding proteins in realtime may be cool to some

Well, actually, you've hit it on the head. Some people do massive amounts of computation that cannot be done in a Microsoft environment without a LOT of work. Open Mosix is one way to simplify the parallelization. This new thing is an easier way to set up the Open Mosix grid. Ta da.

I mean, read up on Render Farms, or nuclear simulations. The really big number crunchers...

Re:I really want to understand...

[krb]

pay no attention to the "insightful" comments that serve to dress up a "Fuck you, MS dude."

I'll try to give you an actual response. People have been quick to mention Knoppix CD's for rescue operations -- this doesn't apply to the Clustering feature, just knoppix in general. I used one of these last night to fix my roommate's system which had gotten totally owned and was halting at LILO. Could i have done it with a floppy based linux distro? Probly, but it would've been a bigger pain, because the floppy is small and may not have the tools i need, whereas a CD is big enough to have damn near everything.

That being out of the way - some uses for the cluster disks.
1. say your server (using ClusterKnoppix), which has a hard disk and lots of ram, etc, runs a really dynamic web site which needs lots of CPU. If you see that you're getting shitload of connections you take some other systems that aren't critical, pop in a CD and reboot and add their processors to the pool to help out the web server

2. as has been mentioned, in academic institutions, you could use this to harness the computers down the hall in the public lab for experiments overnight...

3. i don't today, but someday i may need a cluster, and why make it difficult if i can pop a CD in 6 LAN systems and get it going rather than spending a week on configuration. Shit, i've had occasions where my computer was compiling for 3 days straight... would've been nice to fire up a couple of secondary systems to help out...

i suppose you could call these contrived examples, but they're not wholly unrealistic. i think what you're getting at is, "why should normal people care?" which is a good question. is this useful for 90% of computer users? fuck no. 1%? Maybe. it solves the problem of running a cluster which can be simply and arbitrarily resized (keyword simply). If you have no need for a cluster, then you certainly don't care about a resizable one.

keep in mind though, that lots of things can be cool without being useful to yourself. i have no need for a supercomputer, but i still think they're pretty interesting and cool. i think this is a cool technology too, useful for a certain class of problem, and a limited set of users.

that's my 57 yen... for what it's worth.

Re:I really want to understand...

[myusername]

I have an example of what you what you can do with this. K12LTSP... It's a terminal server that pushes a KDE desktop with tons of apps and works great in almost any environment (espically classrooms) and the server can use openMosix to be clustered for more horsepower so that you don't have to have a really expensive server to run many clients. With cluster Knoppix, when the server starts getting bogged down as you add more thin clients to it, just pop this cd in a spare computer and you can add more nodes as you need to boost the server's horsepower. Many schools are using it, and I'm using a customised version of K12LTSP that I put together that pushes a browser only to certain terminals for patrons to use our online card catalog here at the library (I locked down the browsers using ipchains so they can only get to our card catalog site). Check it out here

A lot of this is really just about having fun and seeing what you can accomplish and what you can learn. At least for me, thats what it's mostly about.

Re:I really want to understand...

[adamfranco]

Well, I use Knoppix whenever I am away from home and want to run X apps (such as my mail client, keeping my mail on my home machine) via ssh. I actually use this a lot, like 3 times in the past month.

As for ClusterKnoppix, well hmm... Here are several things I've come up with:

1. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to do this, but I'd love to be able to turn my home network with several multi-GHz machines into a distributed DivX encoding machine.

2. Along the same lines: Instant render-farm for my home kayaking movies.

3. Want to set up a computer lab real quick and easy? I'm sure that there are lots of situations where throwing up a lab in 1/2 hour could be very useful.

4. A way to test hardware quickly: just boot from network, run diagnostics, move on to the next machine.

5. Have the moon. Ok, well, the best part of this is that you can "easily" remake the image so that it will have any additional functionality that you want. If you think of something that this almost works for, you are free to make it work.

There was a nice comment from an AC buried down there, but I didn't have any mod points, so I'll just link to it: The Programing Competition Use

bittorrent up

[Anonymous Coward]

clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-05-20-EN-cl1.iso.torrent

(also added to the main clusterknoppix website)

BITTORRENT UP!

[parkanoid]

here! Be gentle, the torrent itself is hosted on my school account, and I'll get ownzored by the administration if we get /.ed.

Re:BITTORRENT UP!

[parkanoid]

Doh, it's been stomped down. Never mind.

Re:Pilsbury Doughboy found dead at 71

[Anonymous Coward]

LAME!

That troll didn't have enough goat rape, perversion or obscenity in it!

But hey, at least he tried something new, unlike you!

Let me see if I understand this

[LWATCDR]

If you set this up correctly all the computers that you boot up with this become a mosix cluster? Then all the users are terminals off of this cluster?
So all of the users have some of all of the power of the Mosix cluster?
This could be very very cool. Imagine a whole campus of users running this. Each user would have access to a super computer.
I just wonder how well mosix handles nodes dropping off and back on again. Plus how well will can is scale? Could you have five hundred or a thousand systems off in the cluster. Where is Mr. Barr when you need him?

Re:Let me see if I understand this

[1qa2ws3ed]

> If you set this up correctly all the computers that you boot
> up with this become a mosix cluster?

an openMosix cluster, not a mosix cluster.

>Then all the users are terminals off of this cluster?
if you want, yes.

> So all of the users have some of all of the power of the
> Mosix cluster?

yes

> I just wonder how well mosix handles nodes dropping
> off and back on again.

if a node goes down for a small time, and then comes back, no problem. if a node goes down for a time long enough to finish his work, processes won't come back where they came from, so you (or your apps or scripts) have to take care of this situation. tipically in a cluster you don't want nodes to go down, never. this can be a situation tipical in a pc laboratory or the like, for an entire campus this probably is not adequate, you need something more "grid computing aware"

>Plus how well will can is scale?

it depends a lot on the speed of the connection between nodes, on the type and amount of traffic generated and so on the type of computation being made, on the number of nodes, on the speed of the clients, etc...

>Could you have five hundred or a thousand systems off in the cluster.

tecnically up to 65535 nodes (last 2 bytes of ipv4 address) if i'm not wrong. i was told biggest cluster of this types count 1-2k nodes, but i'm not sure.

Re:Let me see if I understand this

[Anonymous Coward]

MOSIX, no. It is openMosix.
But yes, an openMosix cluster in a few minutes. Nodes can auto-discover (i.e., + or - from the cluster). And it scales very well.
Security is an issue on a campus wide cluster, but that can be addressed. See www.openMosix.org
Moshe? On the net:)

Re:Let me see if I understand this

[LWATCDR]

Kind of makes me wonder if this would not be a good solution for some companies. A bunch of clients logging on to an openMosix Cluster. If you need more computing power just add to the cluster instead of rolling out new systems to the users. Having the cluster be handle faults and making it secure would be the key.

Re:Let me see if I understand this

[zogger]

--that's what I thought too, instead of having to replace all the old desktops, just add a few really nice powerful ones someplace in the cluster.

How'd you boot the clients?

[brave1]

Did you boot the client workstations over the network (Using PXE or something similar?) or did you boot both the clients and the server from CD? (The story mentioned the LTSP

I'm curious about how difficult it is to boot clients over the network.

Re:How'd you boot the clients?

[1qa2ws3ed]

you can do it in both ways. i had 2 nics that support pxe boot, i just had to follow the wizard on the server, and turn the clients on. job done. ah, i precautionally turned off my already running dhcp server after booting the first clusterknoppix machine, don't know if it was necessary, i was afraid of conflicting dhcp servers because clusterknoppix starts it's own with the wizard.

Re:How'd you boot the clients?

[#undefined]

i haven't messed with clusterknoppix (just knoppix itself), but have looked into net booting a few machines at home to serve as x-terminals (since ltsp packages exist for debian and is included with knoppix).

most newer machines with an on-board nic (my ecs k7s5a) support pxe boot as an option within the bios. but for older machines, net booting requires either a nic that supports net booting (should have an eeprom on the nic), which are not the cheap nics that i've always bought, or with a floppy (which can probably be burned to a cdr to make a bootable cd).

for net boot floppy images see the section "Making Boot Disks for Legacy PCs" in the k12ltsp client set-up instructions. those instructions reference the rom-o-matic website, which supplies dynamically-generated downloadable boot floppies using etherboot.

so for a small (1.44 MB) simple net boot solution for computers that don't support pxe booting, but with a floppy drive (or bootable from a cd), look at the k12ltsp instructions and visit the rom-o-matic website for a net boot floppy.

ps the images might even be on the knoppix cd as net boot floppy images are (sometimes?) distributed with ltsp, but probably not due to space constraints on the knoppix cd.

recursive CYIaBCo%s SUYA?!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can. You. Imagine...

A Beowulf cluster of bitchy coments about stupid Beowulf clusters of cluster Knoppix posts SHOVED UP YOUR ASS?!!!

miss me?

Re:recursive CYIaBCo%s SUYA?!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like a good deal, but I think I've got a better one. How about I give you six dollars, and you give me the whole pie?

WARNING:

[Anonymous Coward]

GOATSE LINKSE!

Not a good idea

[PontifexPrimus]

I'd rather not choose that one - "kloppen" is German vernacular for "to hit/strike someone", so Herr Knopper might take offense. On the other hand, it does beat the closed source competition...

Computer Lab?

[GrouchoMarx]

From the web site:

* "openMosix terminal server" - uses PXE, DHCP and tftp to boot linux clients via the network.
No CDrom drive/harddisk/floppy needed for the clients
* openMosix autodiscovery - new nodes automatically join the cluster (no configuration needed)
* Clustermanagement tools - openMosix userland/openMosixview
* Every node has rootaccess to every other node via ssh/RSAkeys
* MFS/dfsa support
* Every node can run full blown X (PC-room/demo setup) or console only (more memory available)

Aside from the "every node has root access" bit, am I way out in left field thinking that this would make a good computer lab system? Just start up the clients and they pull from the Knoppix central server and you're done. No need to have floppies, or even to bother locking down a system. The student does something screwy to the PC, hit reset and you're back to fresh configuration.

Or am I missing something completely here?

Re:Computer Lab?

[Flammon]

Well, yes, you're missing an equally important point that it is a cluster. X diskless workstations are part of this system but making those X workstations part of a Mosix cluster is what makes this setup interesting.

Re:Computer Lab?

[High Hat]

Actually, the idea of booting dumb clients from a central server in order to prevent permanent changes to the system's data is not new and this concept is being used by many universities and enterprise campuses. Together with mounting the user's home directory from a fileserver on the network this makes for a pretty safe "work on the first machine you encounter" environment. But this is not the original purpose of ClusterKnoppix, it is all about utilizing the computational power of many dumb clients to perform number-crunching applications and similiar. But one could probably derive a special Knoppix livecd for your proposed purpose from ClusterKnoppix (if there isn't already one) by taking the OpenMosix stuff out completely and adding a bit of user managment and login service stuff...

Re:Computer Lab?

[Kiaser Zohsay]

Check out http://www.ltsp.org/ and http://k12ltsp.org/contents.html as well. k12ltsp focuses on lab setups for schools.

The whole point of LTSP is booting a roomful of machines from one server. A lab would not really need to OpenMosix part unless you wanted to do massive after-hours number crunching.

Well, Bittorrent is sucking as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, 11KB/sec upload and 0KB/sec download.
This is so cool!

Bittorrent fails yet again

YOU FAIL IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some one beat you to it.
And your tracker is timing out.

YOU
FAIL
IT!

Overhead vs. performance boost?

[phallen]

Quick cluster question, can't find a fast answer on their site: how fast does the performance boost degrade as you add nodes? Using their technology, does it "top out"? That is, does the over head of maintaining more and more nodes, scheduleing the jobs, etc., eventually kill any performance boost you get from adding the node...

Re:Overhead vs. performance boost?

[cdc179]

Don't know where the threshhold is for not gaining any improvement after adding a node, but know that you can have over 2000 nodes.

The bigest bottle neck is the network architecture. The better your network is, the more nodes you can have.

Cool

[WindBourne]

Several of us were looking to do this using Mandrake, for several business with ~ 100 employees. This may be where we head instead. The one problem is the slow speed for the server, so we are setting up a server with 4 gigs of ram. 3 gigs will be used for a tmpfs where we will load / and /usr for nfs mounts. Totally cool stuff.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to look at grendelsbane
http://nwst.de/livelinuxcd/lilinux.p html?include=h tm/en_welcome.htm

Re:Funny images?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he has a gun in his pocket sir!

No, he's just pleased to see us here!

Clusters are a bit overhyped

[semanticgap]

I've heard many people refer to clusters as a way to turn many small coomputers into one large one, but it doesn't work this way. There is nothing magical about a cluster, and it's not exactly like clustering gives you instant supercomputers because (sort of like with SMP) you need your software to be cluster-aware. Clusters aren't really useful in anything other than some very specialized applications where computing-intensive calculations can be broken down into small tasks. Perhaps intensive graphics as in movie post-production or scientific calculations, but not your general IT stuff.

Re:Clusters are a bit overhyped

[h3]

I don't know about "overhyped"- "misunderstood" might be a better word. Using OpenMosix, jobs aren't automatically run in parallel across all your computers - that's a different kind of clustering and requires individual applications to be programmed for that capability. Rather, OpenMosix will "load balance" your jobs if you run a number of CPU-intensive processes simultaneously.

For typical home users, there's probably little benefit. Your web browsing won't benefit. Email, nope. Music playing, nope. Office suite-nope. The only thing I can think of that might benefit would be music/video related encoding.

But this is a big deal for environments such as mine, where you have to deal with lots of users running lots of CPU intensive jobs that take days/weeks/months and you want to efficiently use the CPU resources available.

I'm sure others can think of other scenarios where this can be actually useful.

-h3

Re:Clusters are a bit overhyped

[Anonymous Coward]

So therefore it would be safe to assume that if your software isn't cluster-aware, then you would be sort of cluster-fucked?

Re:Clusters are a bit overhyped

[dargaud]

[...] you need your software to be cluster-aware

This is true for Beowulf clusters where you need to use libraries like PVM or MPI, but not so with OpenMosix, which is what makes it so interesting and simple to use. It makes your cluster act like one giant SMP machine. If you start many jobs they migrate to whatever node is not busy and distributes the load. Not all software can migrate but most can.

I just setup a 24 CPU OpenMosix cluster, and besides the fact that the UPS melted when my boss first turned it on yesterday, it works great... ;-)

Some of my notes are online and I'm working on adding more.

Re:BitTorrent = SHIT and still not legal anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

"I thought this P2P illegal file sharing stuff was at least supposed to be GOOD?"

It's a fucking Linux CD you jackass moron fuck. In other words, it's fucking legal, you're just too stupid to use p2p programs in a proper manner.

True

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you have multiple processes, it'll distribute them.

Re:Come on, I know you're out there

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

"SIMPLE to INSTALL."

Ahhh, so you like Mandrake too. :)

Knoppix is impressive

[FreeUser]

Knoppix is very impressive. As a former Debian (now Gentoo) user and administrator, I can appreciate the quality of the "back-end" engineering in distributions like Debian, which is IMHO hands down the best binary distribution out there (Gentoo is a source based distro, as is Linux from Scratch and Source Mage. It is my preference for source based distros, and portage in particular with Gentoo, that led me to switch, not any argument with the quality of Debian or apt-get, which is excellent). To see such a slick, astonishingly easy live-cd environment put on top of such a quality distribution is delightful, and while I yearn for a Gentoo knoppix (and will likely get my wish with their ever-improving but as yet no-where-near-as-good-as knoppix live-CDs), I have on more than one occasion used a knoppix CD to rescue a non-debian (Gentoo, Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, you-name-it) distribution.

Having such easy clustering, with such an idiot-proof interface ("put the CD in the drive, boot, and you're ready to go"), built upon such a solid foundation where shortcuts that afflict other distributions haven't been taken, is truly an achievement worthy of praise and respect.

In short, knoppix already rocked, and now they have surpassed themselves again! Very, very cool!

Re:Knoppix is impressive

[Dylan Zimmerman]

I've used Knoppix to rescue a Windows 2000 user when his machine suddenly decided not to boot. We never did figure out what was wrong, but he was able to boot, transfer all of the data to one of his two hard drives, and then burn it all to CDs in another Windows 2000 machine after verifying its integrity.

Now, he loves Knoppix because "it didn't just find some generic video card, it detected MY video card".

I've been distributing it to a few close friends here at my university. Most of them like it, burn a few more copies for their friends and the process continues.

Re:Knoppix is impressive

[CvD]

Excuse me, but I'm not getting how you would implement a Gentoo Knoppix? The programs you are going to be distributing are going to be binaries anyway (compile things after you booted the CD??), so a source based knoppix makes no sense, except in the case where you are going to be using it as an install CD for putting it onto your HD.

Cheers,

Costyn.

Re:Knoppix is impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that is what he meant. Gentoo has it's own bootable CD, that can be used for many of the same functions (It is also used as the basis of Gentoo Games bootable game CDs) but is not as good as Knoppix. No GUI for example.

I think what he is looking for is a bootable cd that is as good as knoppix, but based on Gentoo.

Re:Knoppix is impressive

[packeteer]

You want really easy automatic hardware detection? Try out mandrake... It will run on most any consumer hardware.

Re:Knoppix is impressive

[Dylan Zimmerman]

I have. It killed my hard drive.

Technically, I suppose that it was Windows (95 OSR2 upgraded to 98 SE) that killed my hard drive, but the result was the same. I installed Linux and the drive died. That single-handedly killed any thoughts I had of dual-booting. It also caused my parents to chew me out for well over 7 hours. Have you ever stood for 7 hours straight? Apparently, upgraded versions of Windows don't like living on dual-boot drives, so they somehow crash the drive. I'm talking hardcore crashing, here. The drive was physically destroyed. Fortunately, it was still under warranty.

That machine was simply the worst conglomeration of hardware and software possible. I used an Asus motherboard, a 400 MHz AMD K6-2 processor, and Windows 95 OSR2. The three didn't get along at all. I got IOS protection faults every time I booted until I found the patch and installed it. I never did get it working well.

Later, I installed it on a clean drive on another machine, but the machine that I was using was WAY too slow, so I just had a bad user experience.

Re:Come on, I know you're out there

[Schezar]

Mandrake is the bomb-digity. Our OS of choice for all the CS and PVK servers scattered about the room.

What's so great about bittorrent? It's slow

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, yay, I'm getting 3 KB per second... Woohoo, maybe it'll finish by the end of next week.

Re:What's so great about bittorrent? It's slow

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm getting about 100 k/s, just because you're having problems doesn't mean BitTorrent is at fault.

Re:What's so great about bittorrent? It's slow

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, yeah... But it has never been fast... Never, as in every file I've ever tried (a total around 50 files or so) from any source has been slow like this.

I end up just downloading from the site because it's usually much, much faster.

Re:Someone is slipping on the job!

[pair-a-noyd]

never mind. I was reading at level 5.
Duh..

why won't this work for me :(

[jbwiv]

why is it I can go out to the bittorrent main site and click the link for RedHat 9, and the bittorrent prompt comes right up...but when I try to click on this clusterknoppix bittorrent link, mozilla tries to display it to screen? Can anyone help?

Re:why won't this work for me :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the web server isn't configured correctly. It doesn't recognise the .torrent file and send the right mime type (or some similar problem).

I had the same problem. Just save the .torrent to disk and use it from there.

Who cares anyway, bittorent seems to favor a few people and is extremely slow for the rest... Any time I'm uploading 10 times faster than I'm download then I know something is broken.. Bittorent sucks.

Re:why won't this work for me :(

[micromoog]

Hmmm, a technical question on Slashdot. What an interesting challenge . . . I'll get on answering that right aw...DELETED!!

Re:why won't this work for me :(

[darketernal]

Could be that the web server is passing it as text/plain and doesn't know to associate .torrent with the correct BitTorrent mime type (which i don't know off the top of my head.)

It appears as plain text to me too.

As Louis Armstrong once said

[gosand]

I really would like to understand (I'm an MCSE running all MSFT except one server - finance server is running RedHat). Someone explain this to me (linux avocates - this is your chance)..

You ain't from around these parts, are you? :-)

In all seriousness though, I do think that your MCSE and your Windows environment is limiting you here. I actually think the MCSE should be changed to CMSE, because you are a Certified Microsoft System Engineer. You are taught how to admin Microsoft systems only. It's OK, those are necessary things. But the problem is that you have been taught how to think in a "Microsoft world". There is a lot outside that world. Clustered computing is one of them. A bootable distro (ala Knoppix and others) is another.

I am sure when the bootable floppy distro came out, the MCSE's cried "what would I do with THAT?". Then CDRWs came about, and the bootable floppy turned into the bootable CD distro. The MS crowd said "Neat. Big deal." That has now turned into a bootable cluster server. Who knows where it might go from here. At some point, someone at Microsoft will say(or has already said) "Hey, that is cool. Can we do that?". They will try to buy the technology, and will find it can't be done. And they will try to build it from scratch, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I think it was Louis Armstrong, who when asked what Jazz is, said "Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know." I am afraid that applies here.

Will make "terminal" setups simple

[nurb432]

Looks like it would make creating a bunch of PXE X 'terminals' easy as cake.

Plus you get mosix tossed in for good measure..

Impressive on first glance.. i know what ill be doing saturday :)

It tends to START slowly... be patient!

[Anonymous Coward]

BitTorrent clients will "snub" another client that doesn't upload anything, to deter leeching. However, this means that a newcomer will get a truly sucky download rate until at least one complete chunk has been downloaded and subsequently gets uploaded to others.

When I started up the clusterKNOPPIX torrent, I saw about 3K/sec for several minutes, then once my client started uploading data to others, the download rate rocketed up to 200K/sec.

A similar thing happened earlier when I fired up the RTCW torrent.

Re:It tends to START slowly... be patient!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I thought would happen... But I haven't seen it.

Still an hour later and I'm getting 3-5 KB (sometimes 10 KB). And the whole time I've been maxing out my upload bandwidth at 30 KB or so (this whole time). So others are getting all my juice, but I ain't getting no love.

It is always like this... Ah well, I can only guess that somehow certain clients are favored (due to network location or whatever).

Re:It tends to START slowly... be patient!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wierd, perhaps there's something wrong with your client. Try disconnecting and starting again. It should be able to scan the file and resume.

Re:It tends to START slowly... be patient!

[Anonymous Coward]

After a bit of research the problem could be your upstream bandwidth. If you can't serve the file quickly enough to be in the top 4 uploaders for someone else, you will end up choked. That is, you won't be allowed to download from them even though you are uploading to them.

This is based on each upload individually. So if have your upstream bandwith capped at 128k, you will most likely never get to download from the people you are uploading to.

Re:It tends to START slowly... be patient!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what typically happens, this just seems to be a very bad torrent.

Typically I start off really slow but within minutes have reached 150-200 KB/s down with 50 or so KB/s up

after an hour I was uploading at 45 KB/s but getting less than 2 KB/s down

I downloaded directly from ftp and got 150-160 KB/s - done in an hour and half

Re:BitTorrent = SHIT and still not legal anyway

[itzdandy]

i must second the thought of the AC. i am using bittorrent to grab this file in a %100 legal manner and im getting well over 200K.

bzzzzt... sorry.

[Ayanami Rei]

So, when an incoming connection comes into the head-end, and then the incoming socket data is routed over the network to the remote machine running the accepting thread instance, and the reply is shuttled back over to the head-end, and then forwarded to the internet... how is that any better than having Apache running on each server individually behind a load-balancer?

It would be nice to run a database or app. server in the mosix cluster with a web front-end. Apache itself will not scale over the cluster.

I am posting this from toggle switches!

[Anonymous Coward]

"you're using a retarded
40 column web browser

HEY! MY TRS-80 COCO ONLY
HAS 32 COLUMNS - AND NO
LOWERCASE, YOU INSENSITIVE
CLOD!"

You think that's bad, my
TRS-80 PC-8 handheld
only has 24 columns!

And one row!

Re:Come on, I know you're out there

[Anonymous Coward]

most gentoo users aren't known to read the gcc bug list either, or realize that you shouldn't compile the kernel with

Not Flamebait but a sincere question/comment

[carlcmc]

This is truly the problem of the linux crowd. Here is someone asking about linux and open minded. And the response "Hah we know and if you have to ask then that just shows what kind of person you are."

I tried out the previous release of the bootable knoppix and found it incredibly cool. But really, WHAT are the uses for this? or cluster knoppix that we should try or be interested? The only use i have for it is as a bootable cd in case my main os installation is trashed and I need to retrieve some files right away.

You HAVE to SELL the idea to people and not just <neovoice> Whoooaaa, coool dude.

Re:Not Flamebait but a sincere question/comment

[raju1kabir]

I tried out the previous release of the bootable knoppix and found it incredibly cool. But really, WHAT are the uses for this? or cluster knoppix that we should try or be interested? The only use i have for it is as a bootable cd in case my main os installation is trashed and I need to retrieve some files right away.

I think the utility of Knoppix increases dramatically if you tend to be on the move a lot.

In the office, I don't do much with it. But when I'm traveling, it becomes essential. I can stick it in an idle machine and get to the bottom of network problems while other people - even the people who set the network up - are still pointy-clicketing around to find some diagnostic tools on their Windows machines.

I can stick it in a machine at an internet cafe (or anywhere else on the planet) and get reliable, secure remote access to my office desktop.

At hotels and conventions, when nobody can figure out how to get on the show net, I can boot up and sniff for a few seconds to get the lay of the land.

Knoppix has made a hero of me more times than I can count.

Re:Not Flamebait but a sincere question/comment

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely right. That was a useless answer.

The reason you only see using it as a bootable CD if your main OS is trashed is that you're stuck in the model where the OS is inextricably part of the computer, as if the ROM had seeped onto the hard-drive. It doesn't have to be that way.

Offf the top of my head, say you want to have a student programming competition in a small town. You can't get a space that has enough computers in one spot to host the competition, so you have people bring their own.

The competition has two parts, a project part and a challenge part. During the project part, the students run their projects and the judges evaluate them. During the challenge part, you don't want the students to have access to routines they've set up ahead of time. You boot everything off a copy of Knoppix that you've set up so the competitors can't access anything on the hard-drive except a single directory you've set up for their work. Instant level playing field.

You just can't do that with Windows. I'm not saying it's technically impossible, I don't know, but you'd need the licenses anyway. It would be a mess.

sincere answer

[gosand]

This is truly the problem of the linux crowd. Here is someone asking about linux and open minded. And the response "Hah we know and if you have to ask then that just shows what kind of person you are."

No, the problem with the Linux crowd is when someone says "M$ 5uX0r5!!! U r L4M3!". But I don't really liken that to the Linux community, more to the "wannabe" community. I think my response is not inflammatory at all. I think that because of this guy's MS training, he cannot be open minded. He has been trained to think inside the MS box.

I tried out the previous release of the bootable knoppix and found it incredibly cool. But really, WHAT are the uses for this? or cluster knoppix that we should try or be interested? The only use i have for it is as a bootable cd in case my main os installation is trashed and I need to retrieve some files right away.

For some, this may be the only use, and it is a dang fine one. There are many other uses for it, none of which may appeal to you. But you have found a good use for it, so good for you. Other people may find others, or improve upon it in a way so that you may find it more useful. Knoppix fit a need for me, I modified it to create a bootable Quake server for LAN parties. Someone else has modded it to be a bootable MAME CD. I am sure there are many many others. Why immediately think there is no good use for it instead of trying to think of or create good uses for it? Or just recognize the fact that there are potentially other uses, even though you might not care about them? THAT is the difference in the OSS and the other computing industry.

You HAVE to SELL the idea to people and not just Whoooaaa, coool dude.

Wow. I guess I stand corrected. THIS is the real difference.

Re:sincere answer

[Anonymous Coward]

from a dumbass....

Why can't you think outside of your "I'm so much better than MS lackeys" box?

He asked what kind of uses there are. He didn't say there weren't any. You finally gave him a couple examples, but only after berating him for not already knowing some.

He's wrong about *having* to sell the idea. Like you said, some people will think it's cool and do stuff with it. If you don't see a use, then move right along. At least he was interested enough to ask what others have used it for.

Re:Come on, I know you're out there

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

I never use Mandrake on a server... I roll my own servers, but for a PC desktop nothing beats Mandrake..

I include that poor excuse for an OS from Redmond WA.

On a Mac give me OSX 10.2.x or give me death.

I believe in using the best tool for that job at hand. Redmond WA has yet to provide me with the best too.. In my opinion.

"geek-kit" michael?

[scosol]

what is that exactly?

where i keep my long-expired condoms and my 12-sided die?

nitpick...

[benjamindees]

What makes ClusterKnoppix so cool is that it's usually a huge pain to set up a TFTP/DHCP/NFS server correctly for multiple clients.

It's actually plain-old Knoppix that does all of that magic for you. The regular Knoppix distro is already setup to support PXE LTSP clients, ClusterKnoppix just added OpenMosix support.

Useful

[AvantLegion]

Ahh, instant clusers.

For those times when you have to prove that you are absolutely, positively the biggest nerd at the party.

but, because it's so cool...

[zogger]

... and because it *stomps* all over the competition, it should be called "klompen".

This might come as a surprise

[torpor]

... but my first 'official' Linux CD distribution was Yggdrasil (prior to that, I dl'ed the linux tarball directly from funet.fi...) and it had, hands down, a fantastic 'live boot' feature. I used Yggdrasil Linux to rescue fragged FAT32 drives which DOS5.0 had given up on. Astounding!

It had X, even, and you could get it on the 'net. Alas, this was pre-browser days, so no NCSA Mosaic... well, not for the first Yggdrasil disk I tried, anyway.

They stopped doing live boot CD's because, I fear, they were ahead of their time - not everyone had a BIOS those days which allowed CD booting ...

But, just so you know, Linux has *always* had great live boot CD distro's around, from day one.

I need only one extra feature

[korgull]

That is good Chinese language support in Knoppix.

Re:I need only one extra feature

[chihchun]

Hi, you may try http://debian.linux.org.tw/pub/3Anoppix/
and ftp://cle.linux.org.tw/pub2/KNOPPIX/bv1al

These two have good chinese support.

Re:BitTorrent = SHIT and still not legal anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Please choke on a bucket of cocks.

Re:BitTorrent = SHIT and still not legal anyway

[aztechClanIII]

well, maybe you should have seeded you greedy bastard. I could use some dl speed right about now.

~

Knoppix doesn't work with my mouse

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using a MS wireless USB intellimouse explorer. Unfortunately, Knoppix doesn't seem to work. The mouse cursor only moves up & down (no left/right motion) when I move the mouse in a full circular motion. :((

Re:Knoppix doesn't work with my mouse

[kevmit]

Are you using the wheelmouse switch when you boot Knoppix?

Bittorrent and hard rate caps

[3.1415926535]

If you have a hard upload rate cap (common on cable modems), BitTorrent will often max out your upstream bandwidth. This SEVERLY limits your maximum download rate for TCP connections because ACK packets are being rate-limited along with everything else. Try getting a bittorrent client that allows upload rate limiting and limit it to about 1-2 K/sec below your ISP's hard limit, and you will probably see a dramatic improvement in download rates.

In Soviet Russia

[JeffTL]

Knoppix boots YOU! Well, actually, now it looks like Knoppix can boot you anywhere :)

Great, its on Bitorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, its on bittorrent, I'll never download it in my lifetime..

Usually, I am only getting 5Kb/s or less downloads with bittorrent, while giving out 30Kb/s or more. Usually, after its been slashdotted. I've only seen one decent download rate for me on bittorrent, up to 30Kb/s consistent rate, and then my file server went offline and I didn't get the file anyway.

Getright is a lot better option if you want a file. I always max out my connection with getright's multiget feature.

NordisKnoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

My absolute favourite Knoppix mod is called NordisKnoppix. It's Knoppix with KDE/OpenOffice translations for Nordic and Baltic countries. Man, you should have seen those Windows support guys who have put so much of their lives into fixing these MS monsters. Their mouths fell open when they saw that you really need only one CD to boot up the system, configure all hardware correctly and get localized desktop with office software etc;)

It's available from
http://home.broadpark.no/~aklepp/newton/knop pix/NO RDISKNOPPIX/nordisknoppix.html

One word: Gentoo

[Vintermann]

I don't do it myself, but I hear compiling everything from source can take some time. Friend of mine used three days on a P3. But it seems make makes use of this openmosix thing. Imagine what a gentoo install fest looks like after this? Just bring some big boxes to help with the compiling!