Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

In the Calc part of oo.org type =game("StarWars"), enjoy the game.

Thursday I travelled from Antwerp to Karlsruhe by car, I've been doing that for the past 3-4 years and mostly it taks us 4 to 4.5 hours including a couple of stops etc.

First problem was to conquer the Antwerp ring, with the work there we lost about an hour for the first 10 Km When restarting my engine on the ring after 10 minutes of full stop we tought "Ok, we had enough traffic jams on the way already so rather than 4.5 hours it will be 5.5 hours By 1500 we'll be in Karlsruhe". Then on the A4 direction Koln we got stuck in a 25-40 minute traffic jam because 2 trucks had an accident just before Kreuz Kerpen which was our exit to the A61. Finally reaching the A61 with a changed ETA to around 1600 we were happy that we could drive again .. for about 2 minutes.. then we had to stop, full stop, shut down the engine again and wait.

Everybody was walking around on the Autobahn chatting with the people in the other cars. Looking back and forth all we saw were cars and trucks, but no movement whatsoever. It seemed that 3Km before us there was an accident and the road was fully blocked. After about 1.5 hours we saw that cars behind us were returning in the opposite direction and were leaving the highway to the previous exit. We were told that the road would be blocked for the next 4 hours and we should do the same. So here I was driving on a piece of road where people do 160Km/h in normal circumstances , backwards.

Once of the highway the question was how do we get from here to Karlsruhe, I wanted to go back to the A4 in order to take the next big Autoway south A3, or so .. but the A4 was closed direction Koln, so I had to drive 1 exit further. From there we tried to find a way to join the A4 again, with the A61 closed and everybody trying to do the same that took us about an hour. Then from Koln via Bonn back south .. guess what .. just before Bonn, exactly .. accident & traffic jam another hallf hour. With 2 smaller trafficjams for the rest of the trip we eventually arrived in Karlsruhe around 19h30. About 9h30 after we left and 5 hours later than expected.

Luckily when we drove back on saturday the trip only took us 4h30 :)

I've placed the presentation I gave last thursday about Infrastructure Requirements for Linux on the desktop at both the Linux on the Desktop event at Novell and the OpenSquare event online
you can download it from http://www.x-tend.be/~buytaert/presentations/Infrastructure_Requirements_Linux_Desktop.sxi

I updated my world66 maps last weekend

Next week we'll be leaving for Linuxtag Karlsruhe again ..

Matteo posted the old userland tools on the openmosix-devel mailinglist. These are the ones written by some students but he wants to rewrite them,

My initial feedback to the original developers would be don't use variable names in your native language "TAILLE_STRUCT, TROP_VIEUX" etc , same goes for documentation and comments, only a limited number of people speak french and (don't blame me) most of the world prefers english as a their second language.

But at least now we have something to test and play with !

Last friday Facade

Wednesday , Little Budha Next time Stijn will have to pay :)

and yesterday .. Le Cameleon Citron with the OpenSquare people

Oops, I even forgot our tuesday lunch habit, we moved from Mucha in StNiklaas to Mucha serves great food but most of us were still hungry after lunch so were looking for an alternative

Jorrit Tyberghein made it to Cromatic's blog , who still remembers the first edition of OSDEM where he gave a presentation ?

Want More F/OSS Games on Open Platforms? Help Them! by chromatic -- Jorrit Tyberghein from Crystal Space and CEL recently announced that the Linux port needs more attention. The project is soliciting donations to buy a new Linux machine with decent 3D capabilities. I'm sure the project would welcome interested developers with their own hardware too. If you'd like to see Linux (and other free Unix platforms) have more game support, here's one place where you can make a difference.

Before I start.. I have no preferences for any hardware vendor , I mostly work with IBM/HP/Dell material, and all of them ocassionaly have good and bad material.
But this month they all seem to screw up :(

We have a simple need , we need machines 1U with SCSI and a Free PCI slot and be easy to deploy with 2.4 based. kernels.
One hardware vendor got the idea to add 20 cm's to his devices when upgrading to a newer version, The machine worked flawless on a 2.4.25 (SystemImager's standard), however didn't fit in
most of our customers racks. So we asked for an alternative. The Alternative they came up with was aimed directly at the HPC market, so I was really interrested in testing it. It requires SATA. But non of the libata patches I tried seem to work. Works fine in 2.6 but still didn't get the SATA working on 2.4.X. So let's try with the SCSI version. hmm.. oops you need to sacrifice your PCI slot, now that's not an alternative.

So I started contacting other vendors, one vendor shipped me a Demo Unit that looked interresting but not available anymore so all our test were in vain since the new machine might be totally different.
Another told us that there was no need to test the machine since his technical people were 100% sure it would work. When I finally received the machine the network drivers weren't functioning. I still need to test if more recent driver versions work ..

Our roadmap has an upgrade to 2.6, but we need to have 2.4 supported for deployments today. We test and test again before we place machines at clients , the timeframe now is to short to upgrade.

I see a trend where Hardware Vendors that wan't to place equipment in a HPC market don't realise what software will run on that platform.Lots of SSI style clustering environments are still on 2.4 and working on 2.6 releases, which means that a hughe part of the market these vendors are aiming at simply can't use their hardware yet. Now how's that for knowing your clients :(

I just read on /. "Microsoft has decided to drop the "my" prefixes for Longhorn. Instead of "My Computer," it will be just just plain simple "Computer". "
They must have finally realised that a typical Microsoft machine everything but "My" for the average user, so this must all be a part of the marketing campain to prove that Microsoft really has a lower TC0 than other platforms

I've uploaded the first beat of openMosix 2.4.26-om2 , thats the version with migSHM patched into the openMosix three.
http://www.x-tend.be/~buytaert/downloads/openmosix-2.4.26-openmosix2-pre/
migSHM is not enabled by default however. We'll be testing this release for a couple of stress tests during the next couple of days/weeks.
Feedback is appreciated. Please note that this build is based on the vanilla 2.4.26 kernel. You might run into problems with SATA based devices.
We also plan on providing RPM's with libata support available, and RPM's with MigSHM enabled.

Please send us feedback on your experiences !