Free Ubuntu Linux CDs

Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt • Monday, January 24. 2005 • Category: Workstations
Today, my free Ubuntu Linux CD set arrived! Everyone can order a set of free CDs of this promising new Linux distribution. It is based on Debian Linux, but clearly aims at the desktop with faster release cycles and an easier installer. It is readily available for x86, AMD64 and PowerPC.

You can also downlaod ISOs of Ubuntu Linux if you do not want to wait for your CDs to arrive.

Kaya

The Future of Computing - The Cell Processor

Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt • Friday, January 21. 2005 • Category: Workstations
Many people already have heard of the legendary Cell Project initiated by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. This project is about creating a new CPu with a radically different approach - but not many details emerged until now.

Nicholas Blachford investigated in this subject and studied the patant papers about the Cell processor, and he ended up with a very informative article about the design.

If the Cell processor is only getting half as fast as predicted in the article, we can all throw away our PCs and workstations. I foresee that there will be many universities installing PS3 clusters for scientific calculations, like the small PS2 cluster built by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Computer Science department at the University of Illinois.

The Cell processor will consist of one standard CPU (probably an IBM Power CPU) and 4 or 8 additional processing units comparaible to pixel shaders in GPUs. And these processing units will be responsible for the unparalleled speed of the Cell. They are high speed 128bit vector processors operating on local memory and they will be integrated on the same die together with the controller CPU. The expected processing power for an 8 unit configuration is about 250 GFLOP! As a comparison a normal PC with highly optimized code can only achieve about 6 GFLOP.

Kaya

The New Mini Mac

Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt • Tuesday, January 11. 2005 • Category: Workstations
Thew new MiniMac has arrived at Apple. I have to say, I am quite impressed, both with the computer and with its price tag (which is about only 499EUR). I really consider buying one, because I fell in love with Mac OS X, which I currently use at work.

I think the machine would also make a nice and stylisch server, something like the famous Cobalt Qube... BTW Sun opened the complete operating system of the Qubes after they discontinued these little servers. You can grab the source at BlueQuartz.

Kaya

Resizing NTFS Partitions...

Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt • Friday, January 7. 2005 • Category: Workstations
So today I was thinking about installing Linux on my old Windows machine as a secondary operating system. Of course the whole 40GB harddisc was partitioned as only one big NTFS partition.

Some years ago this would have been a big problem unless you spent some money for commercial partition managers - but as I only wanted to use it once for this special case, I did not want to buy such a piece of software. So I was googeling around if there were some freeware partition resiers that could even handle NTFS partitions.

Luckily I found NTFS Resize, a free Linux program that is capable of resizing an NTFS partition without destroying its content. And even better there are some links to Linux distributions on a single CD that do not need harddisc installation and contain this tool. I chose the SystemRescueCd Linux distribution, which is a 100MB package specialised for rescuing any sort of system, which might eventually come in handy some other time, too.

I downloaded the ISO image, burnt it, run it - and what should I say: It works! I can only recommend this CD to everyone who wants to resize his/her NTFS partition without the need to buy a commercial program. And you get a rescue CD as a bonus!

Kaya

Slashdotted

Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt • Tuesday, December 14. 2004 • Category: Workstations
Normally I have traffic of about 150MB per day on my site obsolete.majix.org, which is dedicated to wold computers and especially SGIs. But yesterday I had a whooping 458MB! I was looking at the logs and found out that the page about SGI casemods was accessed 1200 times... And when I looked at the referrers I found a link to slashdot, where somebody has linked to my page in the comments section. Wow.

Kaya

Nice Article about SGI

Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt • Saturday, November 27. 2004 • Category: Workstations
While my daily browsing on OS-News I found a link to a nice article about SGI. Nothing new to the insiders, but it is always nice to see some advertising for the SGI community.

Kaya
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