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Michael considered fate at 11:45   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

And now for a quick geek rant, which I have undoubtably made even geekier by the mere use of the term geek rant and which I will undoubtably make even more so by the use of a faux script tag to demark said geek rant

[geek rant]

HOLY shit are those Knoppix guys cool. This time they've outdone themselves. Building with an openMosix kernel they have created a 'just add computers' cluster tool. Initially Knoppix was just a bootable CD Debian distribution which by itself is damn faacking cool. If you don't know what that means I will sum it up for you:

A Knoppix CD (which is free, by the way) can be placed in *any* x86 based computer, with or without operating system previously installed, and the computer will boot from said CD into a rich linux graphical environment - in fact will allow you to choose between which rich graphical environment you want to use - without disrupting the underlying OS. The key in coolness here, in my mind, is the hardware detection, which is seamless and automatic. Windows hasn't ever been able to get this right and they've been at it for close to 15 years.

Okay okay.. so what's so nifty about this new openMosix stuff?

Linux cluster.

To quickly sum up - you can have a pile of old computers and even if they don't have a floppy, a harddrive, or a cd drive, you can boot them from another computer over the network and then with this openMosix Knoppix, create the illusion of one single very powerful computer. All this has been done before, of course, but the amazing thing about this knoppix is that it is as simple as putting the CD in and booting your computers.

Amazing. Truly. Technology blows my mind every single day.

[/geek rant]