We're a Linux shop with around 400 desktops and have been running KDE for a decade. KDE3 was rock solid. KDE4, not so much. The KDE4 direction of "let's index everything" with nepomuk and akonadi doesn't work so well when home directories are NFS mounted. In fact, it killed our fileserver. Further, why on earth would I want 400 instances of mysql_community_server running and creating a 128MB DB for each user in their home directory just to index their PIM?
In general KDE login times have been getting longer and longer, and the overall flakiness of KDE up to 4.6 have led us to dump KDE in favor of XFCE. Initial feedback from users has been very positive, and we'll be completing the transition this summer.
KDE4 may have some features that are fine for a standalone desktop at home, but it took a giant step backward from KDE3 in terms of usability in a networked environment at work.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights say nothing about the "separation of church and state." It simply states that, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This is the very first sentence in the Bill of Rights, so the Framers considered it to be pretty important. The "wall of separation" was built by Thomas Jefferson in his letter to the Danbury Baptists. http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html. In this letter Jefferson refers directly to the text in the First Amendment, with no additional context.
From everything that I've heard from Ron Paul, he adheres to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, nothing more (building huge wall) and nothing less (infringement on the free exercise thereof).
Root the phone, install MPI, and you're set. Add Torque/Maui for scheduling. Or stick Condor on it. You know the drill.
We all remember what Sony did to the PS2 beowulfs. >:(
This is a shot across the bow to the likes of Broadcom, Intel, Creative, etc.
How many people have run into a problem where Manufacturer X creates a new rev of their chip, and that rev isn't recognized by the drivers shipped in SuSE/RedHat/Ubuntu/nameyourdistro? In cases of a new NIC rev you end up having to build a custom kernel (or just the driver if you're lucky), put it on bootable media, install your OS, and add the custom kernel/driver to the new OS installation before rebooting. Yeah, it's a real pain for the unwashed masses, as well as those of us who have bathed in Linux for the past 10+ years.
I have been hearing people saying how the Eee PC will bring Linux to the personal user, How it is really popular... But I havent seen any evidence of this is Real Life.
I'm as big a Linux enthusiast as many people on/., but the facts are the facts. Asus is or will soon be offering the Eee with a slightly stripped down version of XP. It was great the Asus rolled out the Eee with Linux first. Sure, Xandros leaves a bit to be desired, but for the average user it's not bad. The wireless configuration tool is still lacking in some areas (full WPA support, for example). Someone unafraid of the terminal window will be able to get wpa_supplicant working correctly, but the number of people in the masses who are willing/able to do this is small. There are probably other things that Xandros on the Eee could do better, but for a first cut by Asus, I have to give them credit and not beat them up too much. Is it a Window's killer? Not even close. However, one spoonful at a time...
For the comparable systems mentioned in the article, it doesn't take much to infer that OS licensing costs become appreciable at this hardware price point.
While being a work in progress, the wiki for eeeXubuntu is quite good. My installation was slightly different because I wanted to try eeeXubuntu before I committed to putting it on the internal drive. I have a 4GB USB stick that I partitioned into 700MB+3300MB, and made vfat32 + ext3 partitions. Then I booted the CDROM as mentioned on the wiki and copied in the CD files to the first partition on the USB. Then I booted the Eee from the USB and installed onto the second partition of the USB. I had to do some grub work on the internal sda to get it to dual boot.
After about a week of using eeeXubuntu from the USB I decided to overwrite my internal drive. I made a single partition, made an ext3 fs, copied over the data, updated fstab, and ran grub. Rebooted, and it works great.
Like many, I swapped out the 512MB SO-DIMM for 2GB. They're pretty cheap these days. Not sure if the DIMM is creating more heat and causing the fan to run. Also, I don't hibernate it - shutdown/startup is reasonably quick.
As for the comments regarding updates, I honestly don't recall seeing notices that updates were available (yes, the network was up). I hope Samba is fixed.
In terms of the original article, I have to agree with the other posters. C-net has gone downhill. The Eee isn't in the same league as 14.1" or 15.4" notebooks for under $1k (US). I should mention that you can also score a refurbed Dell XPS M1330 for under $1k (no, I don't work for Dell - I was just considering it as an option).
Cnet writes:
"Okay, the hype overshadowed the fact that it's rather slow, sometimes unreliable and nearly impossible to type on if you had grown-up fingers, but these are minor details."
Minor details, perhaps, but I disagree. 900MHz is adequate for web, and text processing. Unreliable? Hardly. Zero crashes on mine. The keyboard is quite usable, once you teach your right pinky not to hit the UpArrow when going for the '/' or Shift keys.
The three drawbacks I see are:
1) It's rootable out of the box (samba) http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Feb/0117.html
2) Asus didn't provide an easy way to obtain updates for the masses.
3) The fan runs continuously after about 10 minutes of use.
I installed eeeXubuntu along with compiz-fusion and now it's a great little machine.
For the money and it's size, it certainly gets the job done.
A beowulf cluster of these would amount to a slab of rubidium, the geometry of which, I suppose, depends on the interconnect. In common form, body centered cubic. FWIW, it melts at about 103F. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubidium
I just tested this last week. vblade installation was a snap. From there it's a matter of creating an empty file, associating a loopback device with it, and having vblade "export" it to the LAN. On another machine, load the aoe kernel module, install the aoe-tools, and run aoe-stat to see that the device is exported. You can then mount it and stick a filesystem on it from the remote machine. As a test, I started with ext3. Worked fine. Then I put OCFS2 on it to see if I could mount it read-write on 2 hosts. That worked too. All in all, I'm impressed. This should work well for backup, cheap HA, or Xen environments.
The AoE tools, including vblade, can be found
here.
Let's complicate this a bit further. The solar output is not constant. In times of increased sunspot activity the solar output is slightly higher, and the effect is felt on Earth. So, if we're going to clean up or pollute more, we should get the approval from Helios first.
Not being a big fan of NASA's big spending and HUGE blunders (losing 40% of the shuttle fleet to accidents isn't a particularly good record; crashing probes into Mars due to units conversion is so freshman), I'd prefer that Congress starts cutting 10% per year from NASA until they get their act together. It's time they realize that they're not going to get billions to go to Europa, put humans on the ISS for negligible gain, and return to the moon for the sake of being there. The mentality of NASA needs a major makeover: start acting like an agency with a limited budget and getting the best bang for the buck. Show the public more of this (e.g., Voyager, Hubble), and we may be more inclined to support the agency.
Unfortunately, nobody in Congress wants to fry the big fish when it comes to deficit woes: entitlements. Sadly, chopping NASA is a drop in the bucket by comparison. FYI, the CBO predicts that "Mandatory spending" (entitlements) will increase from $1.3T in 2005 to $2.5T by 2016, while discretionary spending (NASA, defense, highways, etc) over the same period will only increase from $968B to $1.2T. Yes, the accuracy can be questioned, but it's a datapoint, nonetheless. Source: CBO Budget Projections
For those who have a domain name and IP bound to there home systems, they're probably running 365/7. Minimizing the power consumption with a mobile CPU is a good start, as the article points out. There are other avenues for power reduction: do you really need that GeForce 7800? If so, can it be powered off when not in use? How about those 15000rpm mirrored disks? Perhaps 4200rpm is a bit slow, so you have to make tradeoffs. There are plenty of compromises that can be made in building such a system. It appears from the article that the tradeoff in the CPU department isn't really in performance, as the Turion 64 appears to perform on par with its non-mobile siblings, so it's probably in the price difference.
For some, a savings of 50-60W over the course of 3 years may pay for itself.
We get a truckload of PDF forms from upstairs every day that need to be saved and returned. Give me that capability in Unixland and Windows can pretty much go away for us.
Thanks go out to the IRS, who has unlocked the Save functionality in their 2005 tax forms. That is, you can save forms from your reader. Until I did my taxes last weekend I didn't realize that was possible. I didn't think I'd be thanking the IRS for anything in my lifetime...
Preying upon the pitiful: 21st Century Darwin
on
MyDoom Strikes Again
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The old adage holds true that all things, including virii, prey on society's pitiful. Unfortunately, counter to Darwinism, the weak are not eliminated from the Internet.
Microsoft Corp. on Monday unveiled a new, preliminary version of its search tool for finding documents, e-mail and other files stored on personal computer hard drives.
Great, now I can put 2GB cache, 4-disk RAIDs in all my desktops so that basic searches complete sometime this week.
I know, if it's smart, it'll run once for an initial indexing and only index new/changed files on the fly. Still nothing comes free, so the cost will be some CPU and I/O, but how much?
Each of these visualization clusters boast huge resolutions, but little is said of geometry performance. Asking Chromium to distribute OpenGL calls from a head node to N graphics nodes for such a large scene will surely eat bandwidth in enormous quantities. Naturally, throwing Myrinet or Infiniband at the problem will help. Just like the old IBM mainframes, you might not want to trade in that SGI Onyx just yet. There may be some problems for which it can excel (and accel).
I'd like to see some geometry perf specs for these hi-res screens and comparisons of various interconnects. Anyone got a link?
Minor correction, Adam Petty was killed in turn 3 during practice at New Hampshire International Speedway in Loudon. Kenny Irwin also died at this track a couple months later in a similar crash (throttle hung at 160mph, hello wall).
For the pertinent stuff, all we need now is for R.J. Reynolds to purchase Sprint and the circle will be complete. We'll once again have the Winston Cup and metastable equilibrium will have returned.
Of course, for true world peace, the Colts would have to move back to Baltimore, the Rams to LA, the Cardinals to StL, and the Lakers to Minneapolis.
Hey, don't knock Cold Fusion. Despite being a much shunned language, its other form could also garner you lauds and praises from the
IgNobel Prize Committee. Of course, dabbling in alchemy always enhances your popularity in the scientific community.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh. Well, if you /strenuously/ object then I should take some time to reconsider."
We're a Linux shop with around 400 desktops and have been running KDE for a decade. KDE3 was rock solid. KDE4, not so much. The KDE4 direction of "let's index everything" with nepomuk and akonadi doesn't work so well when home directories are NFS mounted. In fact, it killed our fileserver. Further, why on earth would I want 400 instances of mysql_community_server running and creating a 128MB DB for each user in their home directory just to index their PIM?
In general KDE login times have been getting longer and longer, and the overall flakiness of KDE up to 4.6 have led us to dump KDE in favor of XFCE. Initial feedback from users has been very positive, and we'll be completing the transition this summer.
KDE4 may have some features that are fine for a standalone desktop at home, but it took a giant step backward from KDE3 in terms of usability in a networked environment at work.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights say nothing about the "separation of church and state." It simply states that, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This is the very first sentence in the Bill of Rights, so the Framers considered it to be pretty important. The "wall of separation" was built by Thomas Jefferson in his letter to the Danbury Baptists. http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html. In this letter Jefferson refers directly to the text in the First Amendment, with no additional context.
From everything that I've heard from Ron Paul, he adheres to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, nothing more (building huge wall) and nothing less (infringement on the free exercise thereof).
Root the phone, install MPI, and you're set. Add Torque/Maui for scheduling. Or stick Condor on it. You know the drill. We all remember what Sony did to the PS2 beowulfs. >:(
Or you could just run Boincoid http://boincoid.sourceforge.net/ on it while it's sitting on the charger overnight.
OK, I'll bite. It's obviously a small Klingon that's been orbiting Uranus for the past 6 months.
This is a shot across the bow to the likes of Broadcom, Intel, Creative, etc.
How many people have run into a problem where Manufacturer X creates a new rev of their chip, and that rev isn't recognized by the drivers shipped in SuSE/RedHat/Ubuntu/nameyourdistro? In cases of a new NIC rev you end up having to build a custom kernel (or just the driver if you're lucky), put it on bootable media, install your OS, and add the custom kernel/driver to the new OS installation before rebooting. Yeah, it's a real pain for the unwashed masses, as well as those of us who have bathed in Linux for the past 10+ years.
The technology is already there. SGI's Altix 4700 (cc-numa) "Scales to 512 sockets or 1024 cores system size and as much as 128 TB globally addressable memory." http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/features.html
Yeah, that's a bit more than 1TB. Imagine a Beowulf... Wait a minute... Imagine a RAM disk.
I'm as big a Linux enthusiast as many people on /., but the facts are the facts. Asus is or will soon be offering the Eee with a slightly stripped down version of XP. It was great the Asus rolled out the Eee with Linux first. Sure, Xandros leaves a bit to be desired, but for the average user it's not bad. The wireless configuration tool is still lacking in some areas (full WPA support, for example). Someone unafraid of the terminal window will be able to get wpa_supplicant working correctly, but the number of people in the masses who are willing/able to do this is small. There are probably other things that Xandros on the Eee could do better, but for a first cut by Asus, I have to give them credit and not beat them up too much. Is it a Window's killer? Not even close. However, one spoonful at a time...
For the comparable systems mentioned in the article, it doesn't take much to infer that OS licensing costs become appreciable at this hardware price point.
An excellent resource is for eeeXubuntu (and the Eee in general) is http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ubuntu:eeexubuntu:home.
While being a work in progress, the wiki for eeeXubuntu is quite good. My installation was slightly different because I wanted to try eeeXubuntu before I committed to putting it on the internal drive. I have a 4GB USB stick that I partitioned into 700MB+3300MB, and made vfat32 + ext3 partitions. Then I booted the CDROM as mentioned on the wiki and copied in the CD files to the first partition on the USB. Then I booted the Eee from the USB and installed onto the second partition of the USB. I had to do some grub work on the internal sda to get it to dual boot.
After about a week of using eeeXubuntu from the USB I decided to overwrite my internal drive. I made a single partition, made an ext3 fs, copied over the data, updated fstab, and ran grub. Rebooted, and it works great.
Like many, I swapped out the 512MB SO-DIMM for 2GB. They're pretty cheap these days. Not sure if the DIMM is creating more heat and causing the fan to run. Also, I don't hibernate it - shutdown/startup is reasonably quick.
As for the comments regarding updates, I honestly don't recall seeing notices that updates were available (yes, the network was up). I hope Samba is fixed.
In terms of the original article, I have to agree with the other posters. C-net has gone downhill. The Eee isn't in the same league as 14.1" or 15.4" notebooks for under $1k (US). I should mention that you can also score a refurbed Dell XPS M1330 for under $1k (no, I don't work for Dell - I was just considering it as an option).
Cnet writes:
"Okay, the hype overshadowed the fact that it's rather slow, sometimes unreliable and nearly impossible to type on if you had grown-up fingers, but these are minor details."
Minor details, perhaps, but I disagree. 900MHz is adequate for web, and text processing. Unreliable? Hardly. Zero crashes on mine. The keyboard is quite usable, once you teach your right pinky not to hit the UpArrow when going for the '/' or Shift keys. The three drawbacks I see are:
1) It's rootable out of the box (samba) http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Feb/0117.html
2) Asus didn't provide an easy way to obtain updates for the masses.
3) The fan runs continuously after about 10 minutes of use.
I installed eeeXubuntu along with compiz-fusion and now it's a great little machine.
For the money and it's size, it certainly gets the job done.
A beowulf cluster of these would amount to a slab of rubidium, the geometry of which, I suppose, depends on the interconnect. In common form, body centered cubic. FWIW, it melts at about 103F. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubidium
I just tested this last week. vblade installation was a snap. From there it's a matter of creating an empty file, associating a loopback device with it, and having vblade "export" it to the LAN. On another machine, load the aoe kernel module, install the aoe-tools, and run aoe-stat to see that the device is exported. You can then mount it and stick a filesystem on it from the remote machine. As a test, I started with ext3. Worked fine. Then I put OCFS2 on it to see if I could mount it read-write on 2 hosts. That worked too. All in all, I'm impressed. This should work well for backup, cheap HA, or Xen environments.
The AoE tools, including vblade, can be found here.
Let's complicate this a bit further. The solar output is not constant. In times of increased sunspot activity the solar output is slightly higher, and the effect is felt on Earth. So, if we're going to clean up or pollute more, we should get the approval from Helios first.
Scientists Blame The Sun For Global Warming
Not being a big fan of NASA's big spending and HUGE blunders (losing 40% of the shuttle fleet to accidents isn't a particularly good record; crashing probes into Mars due to units conversion is so freshman), I'd prefer that Congress starts cutting 10% per year from NASA until they get their act together. It's time they realize that they're not going to get billions to go to Europa, put humans on the ISS for negligible gain, and return to the moon for the sake of being there. The mentality of NASA needs a major makeover: start acting like an agency with a limited budget and getting the best bang for the buck. Show the public more of this (e.g., Voyager, Hubble), and we may be more inclined to support the agency.
Unfortunately, nobody in Congress wants to fry the big fish when it comes to deficit woes: entitlements. Sadly, chopping NASA is a drop in the bucket by comparison. FYI, the CBO predicts that "Mandatory spending" (entitlements) will increase from $1.3T in 2005 to $2.5T by 2016, while discretionary spending (NASA, defense, highways, etc) over the same period will only increase from $968B to $1.2T. Yes, the accuracy can be questioned, but it's a datapoint, nonetheless. Source: CBO Budget Projections
For those who have a domain name and IP bound to there home systems, they're probably running 365/7. Minimizing the power consumption with a mobile CPU is a good start, as the article points out. There are other avenues for power reduction: do you really need that GeForce 7800? If so, can it be powered off when not in use? How about those 15000rpm mirrored disks? Perhaps 4200rpm is a bit slow, so you have to make tradeoffs. There are plenty of compromises that can be made in building such a system. It appears from the article that the tradeoff in the CPU department isn't really in performance, as the Turion 64 appears to perform on par with its non-mobile siblings, so it's probably in the price difference.
For some, a savings of 50-60W over the course of 3 years may pay for itself.
We get a truckload of PDF forms from upstairs every day that need to be saved and returned. Give me that capability in Unixland and Windows can pretty much go away for us.
Thanks go out to the IRS, who has unlocked the Save functionality in their 2005 tax forms. That is, you can save forms from your reader. Until I did my taxes last weekend I didn't realize that was possible. I didn't think I'd be thanking the IRS for anything in my lifetime...
A flatbed scanner that can perform liposuction.
The old adage holds true that all things, including virii, prey on society's pitiful. Unfortunately, counter to Darwinism, the weak are not eliminated from the Internet.
Sigh...
Once someone can network these things together then testing of Borg 0.1a can begin.
I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to my assimilation, so long as Jeri Ryan is involved.
Setting: The boss' office. The President and IT Director are meeting with the lead Sysadmin
Clueless IT Director to Sysadmin: So, if SCO folds will we renew our Linux license directly with Microsoft next year?
Long pause ...
Sysadmin begins to shake uncontrollably, breaks his pencil, quits job, and opens a book store in the Bahamas.
Great, now I can put 2GB cache, 4-disk RAIDs in all my desktops so that basic searches complete sometime this week.
I know, if it's smart, it'll run once for an initial indexing and only index new/changed files on the fly. Still nothing comes free, so the cost will be some CPU and I/O, but how much?
Each of these visualization clusters boast huge resolutions, but little is said of geometry performance. Asking Chromium to distribute OpenGL calls from a head node to N graphics nodes for such a large scene will surely eat bandwidth in enormous quantities. Naturally, throwing Myrinet or Infiniband at the problem will help. Just like the old IBM mainframes, you might not want to trade in that SGI Onyx just yet. There may be some problems for which it can excel (and accel).
I'd like to see some geometry perf specs for these hi-res screens and comparisons of various interconnects. Anyone got a link?
Minor correction, Adam Petty was killed in turn 3 during practice at New Hampshire International Speedway in Loudon. Kenny Irwin also died at this track a couple months later in a similar crash (throttle hung at 160mph, hello wall).
For the pertinent stuff, all we need now is for R.J. Reynolds to purchase Sprint and the circle will be complete. We'll once again have the Winston Cup and metastable equilibrium will have returned.
Of course, for true world peace, the Colts would have to move back to Baltimore, the Rams to LA, the Cardinals to StL, and the Lakers to Minneapolis.
Hey, don't knock Cold Fusion. Despite being a much shunned language, its other form could also garner you lauds and praises from the IgNobel Prize Committee. Of course, dabbling in alchemy always enhances your popularity in the scientific community.
Hey, MPAA, have at it:
Oops, you probably don't have your sniffware ready for *nix yet.