[Nottingham] [Talk] This *THURS* 20/07/06: Linuxing snippets

[Martin]

Martin wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> This *Thursday* 20/07/06 at the Navigation:
> 
> Linuxing Snippets
> =================
> 
> What are you doing with Linux at the moment?

A good evening was had and good to see the two newish faces in with the
group. A warm welcome to you.


Well... OK... So the 10 mins per 'talk' didn't quite work out. Still not
sure whether that was due to the extreme interest in my home-hacked box
o' bits or whether the others were determined to keep out of the
presenting...

So, Michael-S managed to yet again _not_ give a presentation or speak
whatsoever. Other snippets included:

64bit systems: No performance improvement unless your application does
really need all 64 bits or a large address space, however getting a
64-bit system is a good idea for the sake of new hardware and attempted
future-proofing;

PCI-e is not well supported at present;

SCSI/SATA seems to be causing a few IDE headaches as IDE is consumed
into the SCSI subsystem;

fuse: User-space hooks into the kernel filesystem interface. Much
excitement about that and what can be done. Brief flurry about ReiserFS
and Reiser4... Good fun about Paul-S's hackings to mount tar and .deb
'filesystems'(!);

And the comms-rack hacked to take an EPIA board, two HDDs, and a huge
PSU... OK, so I've been doing a little metalwork hacking to squeeze a
few parts into a small comms rack to make a silent-ish always-on
firewall and server. The idea started as a no-moving-parts totally quiet
system. However, costs very quickly dictated a conventional PSU-with-fan
and utilising a scavenged HDD. The blisters from hard work with a
hacksaw, and the time required, has given one very important
observation. That is, a bog standard PC case is a much more cost
effective (and painless) idea!


Much discussion and all good fun.

Michael-S will be giving us his talk at another evening soon.


And it's *LUGRADIO* this weekend! Best of fun for all those there.


Cheers all,
Martin

-- 
----------------
Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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