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<TITLE>Re: [Beowulf] A press release</TITLE>
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On 7/1/08 3:25PM , "Mark Hahn" <<a href="hahn@mcmaster.ca">hahn@mcmaster.ca</a>> wrote:<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>> Hmmm.... for me, its all about the kernel. Thats 90+% of the battle. Some<BR>
> distros use good kernels, some do not. I won't mention who I think is in the<BR>
> latter category.<BR>
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I was hoping for some discussion of concrete issues. for instance,<BR>
I have the impression debian uses something other than sysvinit -<BR>
does that work out well?<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Debian uses standard sysvinit-style scripts in /etc/init.d, /etc/rc0.d, ...<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'> is it a problem getting commercial<BR>
packages (pathscale/pgi/intel compilers, gaussian, etc) to run?<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>I’ve never had any major problems. Most linux vendors supply both RPM’s and .tar.gz installers, and I generally have better luck with the latter, even on RPM based systems anyway. <BR>
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the couple debian people I know tend to have more ideological motives<BR>
(which I do NOT impugn, except that I am personally more swayed by<BR>
practical, concrete reasons.)<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>My ‘conversion’ to use of Debian had little to do with ideological motives, and a lot more to do with minimizing the amount of time I had to take away from my research to support the Linux clusters I was maintaining at the time.<BR>
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Side note, one very nice thing about debian is the ability to upgrade a system in-place from one O/S release to another via<BR>
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apt-get dist-upgrade<BR>
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Much nicer than reinstalling the O/S as seems to be (used to be?) the norm with RPM-based systems <BR>
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-Greg<BR>
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-- <BR>
Gregory R. Warnes, Ph.D<BR>
Program Director<BR>
Center for Computational Arts, Sciences, and Engineering<BR>
University of Rochester<BR>
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Tel: 585-273-2794<BR>
Fax: 585-276-2097<BR>
Email: <a href="gregory.warnes@rochester.edu">gregory.warnes@rochester.edu</a><BR>
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