Well, your thoughts certainly _sound_ good, but these things really don't happen so quickly. Intel's response on Thursday to a news event post Monday is not that they are investing in a Linux company. Investments just don't happen that fast.
Tech support should have undergone a _big_ improvement about halfway through the life-cycle of 6.1. Staff is up, a new problem tracking system is in place, etc.
I'm sorry of course that we failed to answer your question, I certainly tried to answer all the ones I was handed in that time frame, and believe I did an acceptable job at it.
The former seems to be an acknowledged flaw in the k6 processor which can be replaced under warrantee. The latter is less clear but also seems an acknowledged AMD bug (see the article).
The other issue, of course, was the Athlon, which did not boot with the 6.2 floppy images, as the MTRR support we built into said floppies in this past summer did not work on the Athlons. I'm sure if AMD had sent samples to the SuSE offices, this would not have occured, but a athlon boot floppy image promptly appeared on the FTP site after the problem was described. A simple call to SuSE support would have gotten a floppy mailed to you if you have no way to download it yourself.
Or did I miss the issue you were talking about? SuSE can only fix problems they know about. feedback@suse.de is your friend.
News flash: RPMs are not compatable between distributions. Is this a SuSE problem? Nope. This will apply to any RPM-based distrubution which isn't overtly a Red Hat clone.
I'm using the BeFS module in my kernel without any unusual trouble.. 2.2.10. It's read-only for now. Creating support for all the indices and so forth would likely be a tricky task.
A bit of a (working) kludge might be to use the network block filesystem combined with the 'md' device. One box can snarf up all the network block devices (Linux to linux only) join them with 'md', and then reexport them via NFS.
This isn't terribly efficient or portable, but it might work.
Given that Be's networking performance is yet to come close to Linux's, and that Beowulf traditionally uses TCP/IP for their implementation of MPI, etc., I can't see Be being a stellar Beowulf performer at this point.
I also don't see why you need to have a "single set" of software for an OS for use with Beowulf. I'd think you could handle installing the same software in your given cluster, and I don't know of software for Beowulf that people are wanting to distribute in a binary-only fashion. Do such beasts exist?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Be fan, and I run it on my home box for weeks (sometimes while doing Linux technical support;), but I don't see how it would be even as good as Linux for Beowulf purposes.
At one point in time, SuSE was selling a "german slackware". Then they created their own distribution based on Jurix by Florian La Roche (they hired Florian), plus YaST, and some other goodies. Slackware was not the basis of modern SuSE.
The same a what everyone else has been saying. That is, this thing runs BeOS, not Linux. BeOS includes lots of GNU utils in order to run the shell, boot the system, and other bits and pieces. However, this does not make it Linux any more than FreeBSD is Linux.
Bad advocacy didn't kill OS/2, or the Amiga, or hurt the Mac. There are much larger market and technology forces at play in the computer world than whether or not some loonies on IRC make potty-mouth statements. I think CmdrTaco's heavy involvement in the enthusiast world has distorted his perception of the relative importance of such ranting.
Now, it's always pathetic, and sad, and disheartening that such folks insist on responding to events in this way. However, it's not going to go away. There will always be those on the internet who are 14, or act 14. Deal with it, filter them, or act with sufficient integrity that you don't get this kind of crap thrown at you.
As for the other end of things, it'es pretty simple to minimize the occurence of these things. It's a modified of the time honored "count to 10". When you get angry, write the mail if you must, but don't send it for at least 4 hours. Re-read it. Eliminate unnecessary drivel. Excise insults. Take out statements which are irrelvant to the point at hand. etc. etc. etc.
A little restraint can make the world livable for all.
RMS called John Ousterhout, the creator of TCL, a parasite, not Tim O'Reilly.
I think this relates to the closed source/non-free tools that his new company has developed to cash in/build upon (your choice) the open source TCL base language.
I see lots of proprietary extensions to free software, and I don't think that's bad. In a way, any application which runs on Linux is an proprietary addition to a Free base system. If RMS wants the TCL debugger to be free, let him write one, or any of the FSF believers. No one is stopping them.
I think corporations generating a mix of Free and proprietary software is the way of the future. I just think certain projects are going to continue to be more feasible and achievable in a proprietary manner, at least within this capitalist society. Call me a pragmatist.
Quantum has been making solid state drives for quite some time. They are effective for some purposes. They are usually cheaper than RAM and have higher throughput than traditional disks. They have gotten less popular over time as disks have gotten faster and cheap memory technology hasn't as much. Back in the late 80s, a solid-state drive could really be a system boost.
Anyway, yes they exist. They are a bit expensive, and several media makers (seagate, quantum) sell them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, your thoughts certainly _sound_ good, but these things really don't happen so quickly. Intel's response on Thursday to a news event post Monday is not that they are investing in a Linux company. Investments just don't happen that fast.
Tech support should have undergone a _big_ improvement about halfway through the life-cycle of 6.1. Staff is up, a new problem tracking system is in place, etc.
I'm sorry of course that we failed to answer your question, I certainly tried to answer all the ones I was handed in that time frame, and believe I did an acceptable job at it.
Best of luck with whatever distribution you use.
Bootdisks not working on K6? Not sure what you're referring to.
I use a K6 myself, and have installed all versions of Suse since 5.1 on it without trouble.
Looking in the SuSE support database, I see the following two articles: Faulty processor AMD K6-2 with 100Mhz system clock and AMD K6 with more than 32MB - system hangs .
The former seems to be an acknowledged flaw in the k6 processor which can be replaced under warrantee. The latter is less clear but also seems an acknowledged AMD bug (see the article).
The other issue, of course, was the Athlon, which did not boot with the 6.2 floppy images, as the MTRR support we built into said floppies in this past summer did not work on the Athlons. I'm sure if AMD had sent samples to the SuSE offices, this would not have occured, but a athlon boot floppy image promptly appeared on the FTP site after the problem was described. A simple call to SuSE support would have gotten a floppy mailed to you if you have no way to download it yourself.
Or did I miss the issue you were talking about? SuSE can only fix problems they know about. feedback@suse.de is your friend.
Compiling with --nodeps?
I think you're referring to RPMs.
News flash: RPMs are not compatable between distributions. Is this a SuSE problem? Nope. This will apply to any RPM-based distrubution which isn't overtly a Red Hat clone.
The LSB will solve this.
I'm using the BeFS module in my kernel without any unusual trouble.. 2.2.10. It's read-only for now. Creating support for all the indices and so forth would likely be a tricky task.
A bit of a (working) kludge might be to use the network block filesystem combined with the 'md' device. One box can snarf up all the network block devices (Linux to linux only) join them with 'md', and then reexport them via NFS.
This isn't terribly efficient or portable, but it might work.
Uhhh.. Why not just print the CPUID on the side of the chip if it's so equivialent to a serial number?
I also don't see why you need to have a "single set" of software for an OS for use with Beowulf. I'd think you could handle installing the same software in your given cluster, and I don't know of software for Beowulf that people are wanting to distribute in a binary-only fashion. Do such beasts exist?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Be fan, and I run it on my home box for weeks (sometimes while doing Linux technical support ;), but I don't see how it would be even as good as Linux for Beowulf purposes.
At one point in time, SuSE was selling a "german slackware". Then they created their own distribution based on Jurix by Florian La Roche (they hired Florian), plus YaST, and some other goodies. Slackware was not the basis of modern SuSE.
The same a what everyone else has been saying. That is, this thing runs BeOS, not Linux. BeOS includes lots of GNU utils in order to run the shell, boot the system, and other bits and pieces. However, this does not make it Linux any more than FreeBSD is Linux.
This is a pretty goofy viewpoint.
Bad advocacy didn't kill OS/2, or the Amiga, or hurt the Mac. There are much larger market and technology forces at play in the computer world than whether or not some loonies on IRC make potty-mouth statements. I think CmdrTaco's heavy involvement in the enthusiast world has distorted his perception of the relative importance of such ranting.
Now, it's always pathetic, and sad, and disheartening that such folks insist on responding to events in this way. However, it's not going to go away. There will always be those on the internet who are 14, or act 14. Deal with it, filter them, or act with sufficient integrity that you don't get this kind of crap thrown at you.
As for the other end of things, it'es pretty simple to minimize the occurence of these things. It's a modified of the time honored "count to 10". When you get angry, write the mail if you must, but don't send it for at least 4 hours. Re-read it. Eliminate unnecessary drivel. Excise insults. Take out statements which are irrelvant to the point at hand. etc. etc. etc.
A little restraint can make the world livable for all.
BeOS/netpositive uses PNG transparencies.
The OS supports the alpha channel so implementing it in your software isn't so hard.
RMS called John Ousterhout, the creator of TCL, a parasite, not Tim O'Reilly.
I think this relates to the closed source/non-free tools that his new company has developed to cash in/build upon (your choice) the open source TCL base language.
I see lots of proprietary extensions to free software, and I don't think that's bad. In a way, any application which runs on Linux is an proprietary addition to a Free base system. If RMS wants the TCL debugger to be free, let him write one, or any of the FSF believers. No one is stopping them.
I think corporations generating a mix of Free and proprietary software is the way of the future. I just think certain projects are going to continue to be more feasible and achievable in a proprietary manner, at least within this capitalist society. Call me a pragmatist.
Down the drain... down the drain... wheee!
The leetle americans go down the hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooole!
Well, I had my cathartic fun. I hope the rest of you are as cleansed.
Quantum has been making solid state drives for quite some time. They are effective for some purposes. They are usually cheaper than RAM and have higher throughput than traditional disks. They have gotten less popular over time as disks have gotten faster and cheap memory technology hasn't as much. Back in the late 80s, a solid-state drive could really be a system boost.
Anyway, yes they exist. They are a bit expensive, and several media makers (seagate, quantum) sell them.