[lug] FC9 DVD's?

[Lee Woodworth]

Geoffrey David Anderson wrote:
> Great responses from everyone.  But I'm not really looking for awsome wallpaper.
 > I'm an intermediate/advanced Linux user looking to build a small cluster which
 > will function as a portal to various computationally intensive geospatial analytical
 > services and serve as a render farm for very high resolution 3D terrain animations.
I'd be interested to know what rendering system you use and what model/material formats
it can import. The cad renderers I have been using take a while: 27 hours for a 1500x1700
image on a 1.6GHz amd64-x2 dual core. Its an interior view, ray-traced, with 21 light
sources. Would be nice to free up the laptop.

 > Except for the front end controller node, the other machines in my cluster will likely
 > be gui free (That means headless right?).
> 
> I bought a box from Club Linux in 2000 that came with Red Hat, which I've stuck with,
 > and then Fedora for no particular reason except that it seems to work swell for the
 > Open GIS stuff I tinker with.
FYI Fedora 7 uses a customized setup for java. They convert things to use gcj instead of
the sun or ibm jdks. Looked like it would be hard to use outside packages (such as jabref
a java-based bibliography manager) so I tried to install without gcj. That was a lot of
work to uninstall the gcj stuff. Maybe FC9 is more standard.

> If particular distros really suck for "real,production" server side scenarios, then,
> I'm looking for a disto that's particularly great for "real,production" server side deployment.  

Gentoo is very customizable, can be as stripped down as you want. Potential issue is it is
source-based: great for optimizing binaries to a specific machine, slower installs due
to the compilation. Source compilation also means you can select what parts/features
of a package are included with USE flags (-xxx turns a feature off):
     net-dns/bind [R 9.4.2]
         berkdb -dlz -doc* -idn ipv6 -ldap -mysql -odbc -postgres -resolvconf
         (-selinux) ssl -threads -urandom
     berkdb - berkley db
     idn - internationalized domain name support
     dlz - dynamically loaded zones (3rd party extension)
     mysql, odbc, postgres - database support
Depends on the package how many flags there are. Language bindings for libs (python, java, perl)
and static linking are frequent options. You can also create binary packages for distribution
on a cluster. There are no 'stable' releases that get security fixes backported to them. For
many people this is an issue.

OTOH, Hyves in Europe has 1800 gentoo servers managed by 9 people (they call it controlled
chaos). See http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gmn/20080424-newsletter.xml.