Also, why on earth do you want so many partitions?
This is one of the big problems with the success of Linux. All the new users are all well and good, but they don't know the reasons for doing things a certain way. Partitioning is one of those things (and is not helped by crap like Corel Linux which installs everything into a single filesystem).
Basically, partitioning should be as follows:
Have a small root filesystem. This contains the bare essentials needed to get the machine up and running. Historically, this has been small to allow quick recovery after a crash. Once journaling filesystems for Linux become commonplace, this will be less of an issue.
A separate/var. This filesystem holds all your variable data. You don't want a rogue process (or processes) filling up your root filesystem, so you make/var separate. The size of/var will vary depending on what the machine is used for. A typical workstation can have 200MB or less. Large servers could have several GB (and will typically have extra filesystems specifically for/var/spool/mail,/var/spool/lpd, etc.)
If you don't give/tmp its own filesystem, make it a symlink to/var/tmp. Again, this is to prevent the root filesystem filling up.
Make/usr big enough to hold all your commonly installed stuff, and then mount it read only. Linux systems behave badly in respect to/usr. Most 3rd party RPMs (e.g., CorelDRAW) only install into/usr, and aren't relocatable. Not only is this in violation of the FHS (which says that sort of stuff should go into/opt), but it seriously screws with resource planning. Consequently, if you plan on adding stuff via RPM, allow enough extra space in/usr. On a typical RH6.x system, a full install requires about 1.2GB for/usr, plus whatever else you plan on adding there.
/home gets its own filesystem, again, to stop the root filesystem filling up. I personally use/usr/local/home for home directories, so I leave/home on the root filesystem, but you get the idea.
/opt should get it's own filesystem, and should be mounted readonly./opt is for optional extra software, typically supplied by a third party.
/usr/local is your own place to play around in. If you give it a filesystem of its own, then, like home directories, it can be left untouched when you decide to upgrade the OS.
I tend to have a small/boot filesystem as well, mounted read only. This isn't essential, but it has historically allowed me to have a small/boot below the 1GB limit that LILO can boot from, and put the rest of the OS wherever I wanted. Now that LILO can boot from above 1GB, it's not such an issue, but AFAIK, all the Linux distributions that use LILO still ship with the 1GB-limited version
For your 20GB drive, then, I'd have a 50MB/boot, a 100MB/, a 300MB/var, a 3GB/usr, a 3GB/home, a 6GB/opt, and whatever else is left as/usr/local. Make/tmp a symlink to/var/tmp, and you're all set. Depending on how much stuff you're planning to serve with Apache, you may want a separate filesystem for that, but only you can make that decision.
The installer dumps core after downloading the first few files.
More to the point, there shouldn't be an install at all.
I want a full download. This sucks. Maybe Americans just forget
that Internet access costs us money in Europe. Phone calls aren't free.
Normally, I'd download stuff like this using the leased line at work, burn it to a CD and take it home.
With poxy installer programs like this, that's no longer an option:-(
4 megs is plenty to boot a minimal
(say, router & mp3) system.
But with only one ethernet card, and no options for adding more (unless
you go for some kind of USB->ethernet nastiness),
you're not going to have much of a router. That's the main
reason I'm not going to be buying one. It'd make a great little
firewall box, if only I could get two network cards into it.
Oracle is going to keep reinventing the "Network Computer" until people decide to actually
start buying them, aren't they?
Yes, but I don't know why they keep aiming for the home market.
The commercial world is desperate to get away from the
high maintenance MS desktops they have now, and a network
computer is perfect to achieve this. Yet Oracle still insist
on aiming for the home market, where there isn't enough
bandwidth for the things to work at their full potential. At least this time,
they've got slightly more of a clue (apps on CD, rather than downloaded on demand).
True, but then neither have I. Perhaps that's why
I've worn a digital watch since 1978 or so. But seriously, what
has fashion got to do with anything? While I can't really
see the day when I start coding (or even playing) Quake 7 on my wristwatch, I can
forsee a time when it plays me music, schedules appointments etc.
if you makes changes to a operating system and you want to claim that it's
completely backwards compatible... shouldn't it then work with all programs that worked
with the previous version of the OS?
Not quite, no. It should work with all programs that used
the documented APIs for the old OS. Now it sounds like
MS haven't even done that, but you can't really claim that
any previously working program should continue to work.
IIRC, StarOffice used some undocumented Linux kernel features, and
then broke when those features were removed in a newer kernel.
Re:And What's Single-Player REALLY Going To Be Lik
on
New Doom Details
·
· Score: 2
"Great single-player experience" to me now is defined by having a great story
being told during my travails through the plot.
Huh? "Great single-player experience" means just that. It has nothing
to do with a story or a plot, and everything to do
with gameplay. A good game doesn't need a plot, and a good
plot does not make a good game. It's all about
getting your priorities right, and that means concentrating
on the gameplay, not the plot. Despite a few hiccoughs here and there, id have
delivered pretty well on gameplay for the last 8 years or so.
SVG is cooler in every way except it's not out and supported by browsers yet.
Which, unfortunately, may be enough to kill it.
Agreed, although they really need
to sort the font problems out.
Given the MS monopoly on the desktop, the font issues are
unlikely to kill SVG, just as they haven't killed web
pages in general. It just becomes really annoying when people assume
that because it looks fine on their platform, it'll look
fine for everyone.
at least US trademark law you can't TM an English word
or common phrase
Maybe someone whould tell Microsoft, who have trademarks on things like
"Windows Media", "Mobile Explorer", "Links", and
registered trademarks on "Natural", "Starts Here", and of course "Windows".
Most large corporations have managed to get trademarks
on a number of common words and phrases.
The tech CDs O'Reilly puts out use a Java-based search engine. I don't think it's not open source, but it does a good job.
You're kidding, right? I haven't been able to get the search facility to work on any of the platforms I've tried (Netscape on Linux and Solaris, and IE on Windows). Java is enabled for all of them, but the browser either does nothing, or hangs when you select the search option:-(
are we just harder to impress because it just ain't new and different anymore?
But that's entirely the point. There aren't any new, original games, these days. It's either another first person shoot-em-up, a driving game or yet another sports sim. Where are the original ideas these days? Games like Jetpac, Wizball, Paradroid and the like? These weren't rehashes of old ideas. They were new and interesting, and that's why we played them. Of course, the fact that they had gameplay helped, something that most modern games have forgotten about in the rush to get more polygons on screen and better 3D sound.
OK, we all know the best game of all time was Robotron 2084.
I never rated the original myself. For some reason, it just didn't have the appeal of other games at the time. Now Llamatron, on the other hand, had me hooked for ages. Strange...
We're down to 30 or so packages in a minimal install.
Excellent. I tried to install RH6.2 onto an LS-120 to use as an emergency boot disk, but it didn't fit. When your base install, with no packages selected is over 120MB, it's a sure sign you've gone too far in the bloat direction. Then again, I've been using Linux since it came on a boot and root disk direct from Linus, so everything seems a bit bloated these days:-)
Not like "I didn't know what OLEAUT32.DLL was so I deleted it" which kills me.:)
Several years ago, one of our clients called up to say that their system wouldn't come back up after a reboot. It turned out that the user was running out of disk space, so they removed that/unix file that was taking up so much space...
One thing I never understood is what the heck is a person to do with a 320mb frame buffer?
I, personally, wouldn't have a use for one (other than bragging rights:-), but it's not actually that big. At 48bpp (16 each for RGB), you could get 3900x1792, an aspect ratio and resolution that may well be suitable for motion pictures using digital projection. Alternatively, you could have a triple-headed 1600x1200 display. I've worked at companies where three 1280x1024 displays per machine were commonplace, so it's not that unreasonable.
Yeah, I know. After I posted it, I realised that noticably wasn't the right word. Perhaps measurably would have been better. The point I was trying to make (and I guess I didn't succeed very well) is not that you could use a cluster of off-the-shelf machines instead of an O3K, but that the O3K (and other large machines) had some cluster-like properties housed in a single case. Bandwidth and latencies may be orders of magnitude better, but architecturally, they're similar (although not identical).
Login to your beowulf node 1 and try to access memory (r/w) on node 2.
Agreed. However, cluster != beowulf. Beowulf is just one particular type of cluster (aiming for performance). Other clusters provide high availability. It's possible to build a shared memory cluster, although I don't know of anyone doing so.
On the 3000, any process on any processor can access every page on every node -- all through regular memory references.
Yes, but not without cost. Local NUMA memory accesses will be noticably quicker than remote NUMA memory accesses. Building a shared memory cluster from separate machines will give you the same properties, although the difference between local and remote accesses will be much greater.
Up to 1 TB RAM and 512 processors, all on a single system (not a cluster)
With boxen this size, the boundary between a single machine and a cluster tends to get a little blurred anyway. Even SGI are stressing the fact that it's a modular system. Basically, each module has it's own CPUs and memory, and has connectivity to the other modules in the system. What's the difference between that and a conventional cluster? Mostly the phenomenal inter-module bandwidth, but that's just a matter of numbers. Architecturally, is there much difference? OK, so you have a single OS image running across all CPUs, but is that even true any more? Certainly other large systems (e.g., from Sun or Data General) let you run multiple versions of the OS concurrently on a single box as you see fit.
why not just get a custom box with 4 Voodoo5's or GeForce2 GTS's and whacks of RAM and throw in a couple of Athlon's. Box that does the same graphics processing, 1/10th the price.
But does it really do the same graphics processing? Can a Voodoo5 or GeForce2 handle 48-bit colour for example (as used by the motion picture industry)? How about a 320MB framebuffer with 256MB texture RAM?
If you're not using TrueType fonts in X by now and haven't at the very least downloaded the free Microsoft "Web Fonts" library, then I must say stop complaining.
Perhaps you should stop making assumptions. The whole world is not a Linux box. Would you care to suggest how I add TrueType fonts to my MI/X server under Windows? It doesn't support any outline fonts at all, only bitmapped ones. How about for the X server on the DG AViiON on which I'm writing this? (OK, so in the latter case, I could set up a TrueType font server, and tell the X server to use that, but it's not as trivial as it is under Linux, particularly given that much of my X traffic is over a transatlantic link).
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the big problems with the success of Linux. All the new users are all well and good, but they don't know the reasons for doing things a certain way. Partitioning is one of those things (and is not helped by crap like Corel Linux which installs everything into a single filesystem).
Basically, partitioning should be as follows:
For your 20GB drive, then, I'd have a 50MB /boot, a 100MB /, a 300MB /var, a 3GB /usr, a 3GB /home, a 6GB /opt, and whatever else is left as /usr/local. Make /tmp a symlink to /var/tmp, and you're all set. Depending on how much stuff you're planning to serve with Apache, you may want a separate filesystem for that, but only you can make that decision.
More to the point, there shouldn't be an install at all. I want a full download. This sucks. Maybe Americans just forget that Internet access costs us money in Europe. Phone calls aren't free. Normally, I'd download stuff like this using the leased line at work, burn it to a CD and take it home. With poxy installer programs like this, that's no longer an option :-(
But with only one ethernet card, and no options for adding more (unless you go for some kind of USB->ethernet nastiness), you're not going to have much of a router. That's the main reason I'm not going to be buying one. It'd make a great little firewall box, if only I could get two network cards into it.
Yes, but I don't know why they keep aiming for the home market. The commercial world is desperate to get away from the high maintenance MS desktops they have now, and a network computer is perfect to achieve this. Yet Oracle still insist on aiming for the home market, where there isn't enough bandwidth for the things to work at their full potential. At least this time, they've got slightly more of a clue (apps on CD, rather than downloaded on demand).
True, but then neither have I. Perhaps that's why I've worn a digital watch since 1978 or so. But seriously, what has fashion got to do with anything? While I can't really see the day when I start coding (or even playing) Quake 7 on my wristwatch, I can forsee a time when it plays me music, schedules appointments etc.
Not quite, no. It should work with all programs that used the documented APIs for the old OS. Now it sounds like MS haven't even done that, but you can't really claim that any previously working program should continue to work. IIRC, StarOffice used some undocumented Linux kernel features, and then broke when those features were removed in a newer kernel.
Huh? "Great single-player experience" means just that. It has nothing to do with a story or a plot, and everything to do with gameplay. A good game doesn't need a plot, and a good plot does not make a good game. It's all about getting your priorities right, and that means concentrating on the gameplay, not the plot. Despite a few hiccoughs here and there, id have delivered pretty well on gameplay for the last 8 years or so.
Agreed, although they really need to sort the font problems out. Given the MS monopoly on the desktop, the font issues are unlikely to kill SVG, just as they haven't killed web pages in general. It just becomes really annoying when people assume that because it looks fine on their platform, it'll look fine for everyone.
Maybe someone whould tell Microsoft, who have trademarks on things like "Windows Media", "Mobile Explorer", "Links", and registered trademarks on "Natural", "Starts Here", and of course "Windows". Most large corporations have managed to get trademarks on a number of common words and phrases.
No, that'd be VMS. Can't beat that good old big grey wall of DEC documentation...
Similarly, Noise Records and Massacre Records. Virtually everything I listen to is on one of those 4 labels.
You're kidding, right? I haven't been able to get the search facility to work on any of the platforms I've tried (Netscape on Linux and Solaris, and IE on Windows). Java is enabled for all of them, but the browser either does nothing, or hangs when you select the search option :-(
But that's entirely the point. There aren't any new, original games, these days. It's either another first person shoot-em-up, a driving game or yet another sports sim. Where are the original ideas these days? Games like Jetpac, Wizball, Paradroid and the like? These weren't rehashes of old ideas. They were new and interesting, and that's why we played them. Of course, the fact that they had gameplay helped, something that most modern games have forgotten about in the rush to get more polygons on screen and better 3D sound.
I never rated the original myself. For some reason, it just didn't have the appeal of other games at the time. Now Llamatron, on the other hand, had me hooked for ages. Strange...
Excellent. I tried to install RH6.2 onto an LS-120 to use as an emergency boot disk, but it didn't fit. When your base install, with no packages selected is over 120MB, it's a sure sign you've gone too far in the bloat direction. Then again, I've been using Linux since it came on a boot and root disk direct from Linus, so everything seems a bit bloated these days :-)
Several years ago, one of our clients called up to say that their system wouldn't come back up after a reboot. It turned out that the user was running out of disk space, so they removed that /unix file that was taking up so much space...
Yep, mea culpa. I was dividing 320MB by 48, not by 6 (or 8, if you assume 32-bit word aligned accesses).
Yep, couldn't agree more. Don't even think of using anything other than hardware RAID for something like that, too. You won't regret it.
I, personally, wouldn't have a use for one (other than bragging rights :-), but it's not actually that big. At 48bpp (16 each for RGB), you could get 3900x1792, an aspect ratio and resolution that may well be suitable for motion pictures using digital projection. Alternatively, you could have a triple-headed 1600x1200 display. I've worked at companies where three 1280x1024 displays per machine were commonplace, so it's not that unreasonable.
Ermmm... no. Data General and Sequent have both been shipping NUMA boxen for many years now.
Yeah, I know. After I posted it, I realised that noticably wasn't the right word. Perhaps measurably would have been better. The point I was trying to make (and I guess I didn't succeed very well) is not that you could use a cluster of off-the-shelf machines instead of an O3K, but that the O3K (and other large machines) had some cluster-like properties housed in a single case. Bandwidth and latencies may be orders of magnitude better, but architecturally, they're similar (although not identical).
Agreed. However, cluster != beowulf. Beowulf is just one particular type of cluster (aiming for performance). Other clusters provide high availability. It's possible to build a shared memory cluster, although I don't know of anyone doing so.
On the 3000, any process on any processor can access every page on every node -- all through regular memory references.
Yes, but not without cost. Local NUMA memory accesses will be noticably quicker than remote NUMA memory accesses. Building a shared memory cluster from separate machines will give you the same properties, although the difference between local and remote accesses will be much greater.
With boxen this size, the boundary between a single machine and a cluster tends to get a little blurred anyway. Even SGI are stressing the fact that it's a modular system. Basically, each module has it's own CPUs and memory, and has connectivity to the other modules in the system. What's the difference between that and a conventional cluster? Mostly the phenomenal inter-module bandwidth, but that's just a matter of numbers. Architecturally, is there much difference? OK, so you have a single OS image running across all CPUs, but is that even true any more? Certainly other large systems (e.g., from Sun or Data General) let you run multiple versions of the OS concurrently on a single box as you see fit.
But does it really do the same graphics processing? Can a Voodoo5 or GeForce2 handle 48-bit colour for example (as used by the motion picture industry)? How about a 320MB framebuffer with 256MB texture RAM?
Perhaps you should stop making assumptions. The whole world is not a Linux box. Would you care to suggest how I add TrueType fonts to my MI/X server under Windows? It doesn't support any outline fonts at all, only bitmapped ones. How about for the X server on the DG AViiON on which I'm writing this? (OK, so in the latter case, I could set up a TrueType font server, and tell the X server to use that, but it's not as trivial as it is under Linux, particularly given that much of my X traffic is over a transatlantic link).