[Weaver]

Who thinks they have the worst horror story, either from what they did or what someone did to them after they did it... Let me have em.

Mine was only a couple of years ago when I first started with Linux. I was 17 years old and was a curious young chap, hell I still am. Anyways, one of my Linux mentors was running a five node Beowulf cluster of Pentium 133's. Some of you older folk poking through this forum have heard of the Pentium f0 bug, right? Remember what happens when you execute the "f0 0f c7 c8" instruction, crash, hang, (insert expletive here). Now imagine executing that instruction set on the host/master machine in a Beowulf cluster. Little did I know at the time my mentor's machines were in mid-compile of his semester final. Yeah, 'nuf said.

-Weaver

[kanaloa]

Ouuuch. :o

For us who don't speak *nix.... explain the Beowulf cluster.

Only Beowulf I ever knew was from English class, lol.

I need to get up to spee on my terms for this OS. Can anyone point me in a good direction, and don't say Lindows.com. That's just Windows and Linux combined... and if I'm gonna learn *nix I'm gonna learn base up.

[Weaver]

The Beowulf cluster is an attempt to build a supercomputer using standard "off the shelf" pc's. Technically a Beowulf cluster could be two machines processing in parallel, but usually they consist of five or more machines running some variant of Linux interconnected via ethernet and processing in parallel.

The first Beowulf cluster was built in 1994 at the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS). It consisted of 16 Intel DX4 processors. As of right now, to my knowledge the fastest Beowulf cluster out there is the one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It consists of 140 Alpha processors linked via some form of ethernet, probably gigabit.

Now executing the Pentium f0 bug on the master node not only caused it to crash, but all of the other machines as well. Needless to say he was not very happy. Hope that helped.

-Weaver

[XJan87]

Wasn't the movie Final Fantasy created with loads of Linux machines connected via ethernet?

[Weaver]

Jan, now that you mention it, I think it was.

John, I started at linuxnewbie.org That might be a little slow paced if you have been using linux for a while, but I still visit it at least once a week. Their painstakingly easy approach to explaining things is appreciated even by those who would not consider themselves newbs.

-Weaver

[\nomen]

All this Linux talk got me going..

I'm currently downloading RedHat 7.3. Thee iso's.. If the weather turns bad in the weekend I'll see if I install it.....

My last attempt with Linux went bad. Or at least I went mad..

I made a dualboot (or triple, 2000 is in there too) with XP and Mandrake. The error I made was to let Mandrake's partitioning tool resize my "media-partition", the one with all my music and movie-stuff. It was not a good idea, as it became unmountable from Windows. I knew it was a risky operation and should never have attempted.. Anyway, after burning the best of the music to cd's from linux, I formatted the linux parts and the "media"-part. and there went Linux.

Anyways, Mandrake was a great OS! The only reason I'll go for RedHat this time is out of curiosity. Who knows, maybee it's better!

It's gonna get it's very own partitions, prepared with P-magic BEFORE I start to install it!

\nomen

[kanaloa]

Where can one obtain Mandrake?

[\nomen]

*** Edited at 22:38. There was a typo in one address.
***

I downloaded mandrake from this ftp:

ftp://ftp.uib.no/pub/linux/mandrake-8.2/iso-images/

It's the three .iso's on the top.

This site also has RedHat 7.3, but those files are not as recent as those I downloaded from this ftp today:

ftp://ftp.uit.no/pub/linux/redhat/current/en/iso/i386

I grabbed the three ("valhallas") on the top. I don't know what the other two are.

These are Norwegian (fast) university servers. You might check out someone local.

\nomen

[epec254]

www.mandrake.com has a bunch of mirrors.

so does www.linuxiso.org (may have a dash)

[purplehawk]

My worst experience with a computer involved an older version of Bessie, Windows 98SE/Millenium, and the Norton AntiVirus appropriate to those versions of Windows. Therein lies my long aversion to NAV in any form!

Anyway, Norton crashed and began snatching drivers from elsewhere in the computer, causing a massive registry failure. Basically a dead machine that wouldn't boot. Wouldn't do anything.

This happened over a weekend when my regular geek-type was unavailable, so I took Bess into the puter store first thing Saturday morning. When I think back now, there were all kinds of options we could have done at the time, but the dingbat I got insisted I should buy a copy of Windows Millenium or 2000 and upgrade. He mentioned I would need "to install a few drivers," but after that I should be back in business. I said "okay" and he installed it. I saw a desktop. I thought all was okay and took Bessie home.

Well, you all can guess what happened. Nothing worked. I spent 16 hours on the phone with Microsoft, in two conversations, rebuilding my computer. I didn't know anything about sites like this one. I was lucky to get a swift escalation to someone at Microsoft who really knew his stuff. When the exact same thing happened to my grandson's computer a couple of months later, I was able to rebuild it myself without all the drama...

That was two years ago. By early 2001, I was ready to jump ship on ME. The damned thing was more trouble than it was worth. I was all ready to buy 2K when someone cautioned me to wait for XP. I could have a copy in August. I waited and I haven't been sorry.