Buccaneer for Hire. wrote:
*Sigh* The best distro is the one that gets the most of YOUR work done in a given amount of time.
... without you pulling out your remaining hair (for we the folicly challenged/diminshed) in order to be able to start doing your work in the first place.
Distributions are just big collections of stuff. Some collections are better built/constructed than others. Some are just piss-poor, and require you to rebuild sections of the infrastructure in order to properly rebuild packages to be useful. Some come with everything including the kitchen sink.
The distros I like the most for cluster building are OpenSuSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu. This tends to change over time. All have modern kernels, and despite efforts to the contrary on the part of some package builders (see if this sounds familiar "we only support distro X"), stuff just mostly works on them without significant pain. Well, some minor nits (4k stacks hrrumph!), but these distros tend to be pretty good (yeah, I do like Fedora).
The issue when you are building the cluster is whether or not your hardware (nice, shiny, new) does in fact support the distro you would like to use. Chances are, if you are using "older" more established technology on the HW side, you likely have a reasonable shot of getting more conservative distros to be supported (RHEL/Centos, SuSE, ...) to work.
There are other issues, some of which are biting people now on other lists, whereby some of the distro's choices come back to haunt them with a fury. Such as supporting ext3 as their advanced file system. Doesn't work well when you have storage units larger than ext3's maximum file system size, or files larger than ext3 can handle. RHEL is famous for this, if you need to use large disks or large files, they have effectively precluded using that distro. You can use Fedora, with xfs and jfs and not run into this issue, though there are others (4k stacks, SELinux, cough cough!) that can make a grown distro user cry. Luckily, those issues are all solvable.
At the end of the day, its about which pile-o-packages you want, and which will get you running as quickly as possible with the minimum pain possible. This is an important aspect, which often gets lost in the shuffle.
-- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics LLC, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 786 8423 fax : +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
