Re: Dpkg 1.4.0.31 works!!! + ALS news from the front
Way to go guys. I know we all appreciate the hard work and long
hours you are putting in. I was hoping to see you all at the Atlanta
Linux Showcase. But it's a long drive/flight, I guess. 20 minutes for
me. Tee hee.
Well, since you couldn't be there, I'll report on Alpha-related
things that were present. Metrolink had Metro-X running on a 21164-600
dual-video card, twin-headed beast of a machine. Looked quite good, from
the brief demo I saw. Linux Hardware Solutions also had a 21164-600 up
and running, with some kind of experimental 3-D chip/SW package. Kicked
some serious tail. BTW, both of the above were running Xaos. It seemed a
bit slow, until I saw that there were multiple sessions running, in
addition to some really cool GL demos. The Debian boys were there, but
only on Intel. At least they were playing Quake, so I guess it is OK. I
went to 3 of the sessions offered, in addition to the Keynote Speech by
Allen Miner of Oracle. No mention of further ports, but he was quite
upbeat about Linux's essential position in the market. He was way
Anti-MS, maybe due to his constant laptop problems in Powerpoint, maybe
due to the rabid crowd, maybe due to his employer, or maybe even due to
common sense. As for the conferences, I saw Larry Augustin of VA Research
on Linux Hardware Benchmarks. Quite informative, lots of little tricks
towards using the standard benchmarks to track down a myriad of hardware
problems. I saw Simon Horman give a speech on high-availability servers.
He seemed to mostly stick to NFS, but did a bit on AFS, and several
variants of cacheing-NFS. Also, I saw Britt Kinsler, a local COO for a
company that builds SW interfaces for thin servers, ie print servers,
CD-ROM servers, etc. They were a DOS shop, until serious problems forced
them to rethink that. Out of chance they found a certain free OS, that
came with necessary development tools. Now, they are a RedHat Support
Partner. This is in a span of a year. I guess the learning curve isn't
so steep afterall. Finally, I saw Don Becker's presentation on Beowulf
clusters. Droooollll... This was probably my favorite. He went into the
problems that he and NASA are solving with their clusters, mentioned
several other really big clusters (including LLNL's 140 CPU Alpha cluster
Avalon), the networking topology, HW setup, recommendations, and
requirements, SW design for parallelism, but ran out of time to give us
the full breadth of the project. He did touch on some truly interesting
projects, one where the machines are acting as a huge RAID cluster (2GB)
with a goal of increasing the output to 1Gbps. Apparently they are stuck
at a mere 450Mbps or so. My memory bandwidth isn't that fast. Sigh....
Finally, he mentioned that he has two boxes at home, a K6-2 350 and an
Alpha. Hooray for the good guys.
I'll post more tomorrow...
Scott Lewis
Computer Support
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
scott.lewis@ce.gatech.edu (404) 894-2210
"Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot."
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