Desktop Linux: Why it may have lost its chance

Desktop Linux: Ready for the mainstream

Fat, fatter, fattest: Microsoft’s kings of bloat

In the how-to for installing Xubuntu & BOINC for a dedicated cruncher there is a fair amount of detail on partitioning the HDD (page 2).  The example drive used is a 10GB drive.  Much time has passed since that original how-to was written and posted here (and on the Guru-Mountain team site).  10GB HDDs are getting to be almost rare.  20GBs are considered practically throw away by many and it’s hard to buy a new drive under 80GB.  My most recent HDD aquisition was actually a lot of five 40GB 2.5″ (laptop) SATA drives.  This has become my ‘drive of choice’ for now.

Here’s a partial cut and paste of my post from Guru-Mountain on the partitioning topic:

2) ASSUMING min HDD size of 10GB… My experience with HDD partitioning indicates letting Ubuntu manage the space will cause you less long term grief. I no longer allocate /boot, /var or /temp but rather ONLY specify a primary partition for /swap (of 512MB to 1024MB), the “/” (root) partition (again another primary & around 8.5GB on a 10GB drive, 15GB on a 20GB drive) and finally another partition (logical or primary) for /home that is the remaining space on the drive. Besides not having issues with /boot filling up or /var/lib/boinc-client being too small there are some real advantages to using this layout should you later need to clone a partition over to another drive.

Jeff (the primary author with my help on the VNC portions) agrees that this ‘how-to’ is due for an update or overhaul to include some other partitioning options and some notes for other Linux variations.  So that’s on the ‘to-do’ list.

Rockin’ Linux

Good blog… I meant to post up a link to it some time ago but… well u know.

I can certainly identify my Windows experience with much of this.

Charlie Brown

I’ve found a great organization and a great guy to work with in helios and Ken Starks.

This is were I’ve spent my Saturdays for the last few weeks: Learning Center, Si Se Puede

The Project Director of Si Se Puede (Christina) and her hubby (Ceasar) are also the most fantastic folks.  Of course I was highly influenced by the presence of breakfast tacos on my arrival.

Also trying to spend some time evenings fixing up the donated hardware that helios puts into kid’s homes.

Skip

I wrote up something about how I ended up with software RAID 10 on my Dotsch/UX server.  Not exactly a how-to and it centers around my Dotsch/UX server that supports several headless & diskless clients.  However Dotsch/UX is a distro based very closesly on Ubuntu and all the actual RAID setup is identical.  It contains several links to some how-to articles and points out some of the stengths / weaknesses of those along with a general software RAID info.  It’s under the main section called “more info”.

Next up?  Who knows.  Probably something on doing number crunching on video cards (GPU)… but then I’ve already done a couple of posts on the Guru Mountain Team website and may just leave it there.  We’ll see.

We’ve added some new, more recent pictures of the Texas Cruncher Basket Stack in the PHOTO GALLERY section of the site. The current configuration is 48 cores of highspeed crunching power.

Up in the northern wastelands of Nebraska, our webmaster was forced to actually do some work to pass the time, during a critical beer shortage. The new design for the website is done, with only some content material to be added over the next few days. The SITE NEWS blog should make announcements, updates and mindless ramblings easier to add. We hope to add a few new features to the website in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: Sept 5, 2008 - The Guru Mountain DC Team website also got a new facelift. Be sure and check it out!