Free Software Linux

 

 Customers, Partners Run Top Supercomputers on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for High Performance Computing

Press Release

World’s three most powerful supercomputers run SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell

WALTHAM, Mass.— 11 Jun 2008— Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell®. According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux* of choice on the world’s largest HPC supercomputers today. Of the top 50 supercomputers worldwide, 40 percent are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, including the top three – IBM* eServer Blue Gene at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM eServer BlueGene/P (JUGENE) at the Juelich Research Center and SGI* Altix 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.

Nice little boxes, very much tailored to the young crowd, but check out the Atom processor!! =============== Press Announcement: Novell Extends Desktop Linux Leadership Through Pre-Load Agreement With Micro-Star International Press Release Micro-Star International will deliver low-cost, mini-notebooks pre-loaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop

Yes, Virginia, you can get an EEE PC from Royal Bank of Canada for opening an account! Open or switch to the RBC Signature No Limit Banking™ or RBC VIP Banking® account between May 1, 2008 and September 12, 2008 (the “Promotional Period”) and receive a FREE Asus Eee PC 2G with a retail value of $299.00 CDN. Account fees apply. Of course, restrictions and rules apply, but hey, it’s better than a toaster or a set of Ginzu Knives, eh? RossB

I just got the new SLED pre-loaded HP 2133 referenced earlier by Kevin, I’ll be doing a first impressions and then a more lengthy review very soon. Zero Day impression: This is a very nice and handy machine, with huge capacity and a nearly full-size keyboard, flawlessly executed. RossB

From the article:

This article shows how you can use an iPod on a Linux desktop with the Rhythmbox audio player. It covers how you can upload MP3 files from your desktop to your iPod and delete files on the iPod. Normally, Apple’s iTunes software is needed to manage an iPod, but iTunes is not available for Linux. Fortunately, there are Linux alternatives such as Rhythmbox that can handle the task.

Read More.

Customers are always looking for ways to get their cost of Linux deployments down lower, and make management easier on their staff. One of, at least in my opinion, the best options they have is to get rid of 3rd party multi path IO solutions for your SAN and disk management. I was at one of my customers the other day helping them set up MPIO that is built into SLES 10. While I was there I took a few notes for what we did to get things working for their environment. These same instructions should work with other SAN’s that can handle multi path IO. SLES 10 supports a lot of SAN’s right out of the box and automatically detects them so you don’t really need an /etc/multipath.conf. My customer likes to be able to change the black list for various types of hardware they use and wanted user-friendly names. To do this I created a multipath.conf for them that looked like the following… ## /etc/multipath.conf file for SLES 10 ## You may find a full copy of this file, with comments, here.. ## /usr/share/doc/packages/multipath-tools/multipath.conf

From the Press Release: Reliable and Affordable SAP® Business All-in-One Solution with SAP® MaxDBTM Database and SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell to Be Preconfigured, Pretested and Preinstalled on HP Systems

From the article: The topic of a bootable external USB Linux hard drive (without dual-boot) is an area that is not well documented. A simple Google search shows many articles, blogs and forum posts written on this topic, all of them discuss setting up dual-boot strategies. While I did not specifically test a USB Thumb Drive and did not intend to address this device in this article, I see no reason why this would not work for Thumb Drives as well. This article was written with the goal of defining an alternative to the traditional dual boot concept and keeping each operating system isolated from each other. Read More.

Note:  Oops, testing new blogging client leads Ross to post a blank article.  Fixed. You all know how we are fascinated (myself in particular) with the sub-notebook phenomenon, little portables loaded with Linux and selling for little money in great numbers, it’s a new economy of Linux-based machines, and it’s driving the traditional Notebook makers crazy. There’s a great article you should read comparing the Asus EEE PC to it’s main competitors, full of good info and very timely too, as the competitors to the EEE continue to appear. From the article: Bored with making MacBooks for Steve Jobs, one day Asus decided to create its own stylish laptop and flog it on the cheap. The result was the Eee PC — a Linux-based ultraportable notebook that wowed consumers, shocked rival manufacturers and is slowly but surely revolutionising an industry.

From the article:

At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Supercomputing Center a couple of days ago, HP announced the release of its first Linux-powered computer to be sold in the United States, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1…

Read More.

There’s a trend developing if you haven’t noticed… small, lightweight, but functional laptops.

• Asus Eee PC (read my impressions…)
• Macbook Air
• Lenovo X300
• …others…

…and now you can add a similar form-factor device from HP to the list - HP 2133 Mini-note PC. You can read the HP press-release here or review the entire HP press kit.

From the article: The Linux kernel is a restless beast, and must continally evolve and change. Especially in ways that mystify us poor end lusers. A recent wrinkle, as of kernel version 2.6.20, is changing the /dev names for ATA devices, so that all ATA and SCSI devices are named /dev/sd*. This is a result of using the shiny new libata subsystem. In the olden days PATA (also called IDE) hard drives and ATAPI devices (CD/DVD, tape drives) were /dev/hd*, and SCSI and SATA devices were /dev/sd*. Read More.

From the article: The Linux kernel is a restless beast, and must continally evolve and change. Especially in ways that mystify us poor end lusers. A recent wrinkle, as of kernel version 2.6.20, is changing the /dev names for ATA devices, so that all ATA and SCSI devices are named /dev/sd*. This is a result of using the shiny new libata subsystem. In the olden days PATA (also called IDE) hard drives and ATAPI devices (CD/DVD, tape drives) were /dev/hd*, and SCSI and SATA devices were /dev/sd*. Read More.

From the article: Why, in the midst of a major Windows Home Server push, would HP introduce a little Linux-based NAS at half the price? And why would HP make the $300 Media Vault mv2120 so full featured and easy that its $600-and-up MediaSmart Servers look A) too bulky B) too expensive C) too overloaded D) all of the above? Is HP telling Microsoft there’s no need for Windows Home Server, especially in light of its recent troubles? Or is HP saying that WHS is nice, but it’d be nicer if it was actually priced as an accessory? Whether the new Media Vault is a lurch away from Microsoft’s gravitational pull, or whether it’s a placeholder until Redmond can come up with a formula for $300 WHS boxes, it’s a pretty cool little machine.

From the article: The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference. Earlier this week, contest sponsors had put three laptops up for grabs to anyone who could hack into one of the systems and run their own software. A US$20,000 cash prize sweetened the deal, but the payout was halved each day as contest rules were relaxed and it became easier to penetrate the computers. Read More.