I heard a rumor that 10% of Dell laptops available with Ubuntu were going out that way. That's a milestone. If you look at the Intel whitepapers from their recent development conference, they openly tout their willingness to share graphics APIs with the open source community. That's a milestone. If you look at the rumor that Dell was a major factor in Broadcom's recent Linux driver release for their NICs, that's a milestone. Enough of the distro wars, already. My eight-year-old is quite happy with Ubuntu except for the @#$%!! Doze games, and it just works for him. Me, I'm more happy with its total available software availability/compatibility than I am sad about its weird root user structure. I also love the documentation section in the package manager, a real help and a first to my knowledge. And, yes, my 5 year old Inspiron quite happily runs Ubuntu 8.04, although I haven't tried getting Dell's latest drivers et al for it. I run Folding@Home on it 24x7 and it's almost as responsive as my new four-core minitower with Doze. (and THAT's much happier as a FreeBSD 7 server!) Kick ASCII, guys! We got 'em on the run!!! »

Doug - Your desire to do this on the cheap is admirable. I just bought a Dell Inspiron mini-tower with a 4-core and installed a second drive with FreeBSD 7 on it. Virtually linear speedup on my web and MySQL apps. 4 cores == (0.95%) 4x one 2.4G core. The Intel 4c is really 2x 2c, so it's not quite clean, but damn close in the real world. The whole box with video and drives and 3G of DDR was $1000 incl display and UPS. I'm sure I could make a mini-cluster as you have and have a nice video wall to boot, not to mention a terabyte of drives. You don't really address why cheap is necessary. You get to play all day and toss and turn all night, but out here we live by value per GFLOP. If I put that much horsepower together, I better be making money from it. Yes, there were some pretty toys like yours at the Maker Faire in Austin this past week, but geeks with toys are just geeks with toys. A Dell M1000e half full of blades will cost $50G - $100G fully decked out, but any real app for that much horsepower should pay back that much and more in less than two years, not to mention salary for a geek or three. It'll still be running in five years, unlike your little homebrew. If you're one of the geeks your app pays for, then you get to play for real in the big app called "business". »

Am I missing something? We have the killer app: weather analysis and other similar things like visual portrayals of Finite Element Analysis and DiffEq runs. Not to mention my kid's game machines. 8+1 core Cell processors aren't going to cut it for very long, and my last perusal of the Stanford Folding@Home READMEs hinted that the graphics processors were scaling core count through the roof and that they were quite happily making use of them. Another prediction: just as home video became more real and hi-res cameras are now $449 commodities, the Linux and FreeBSD clusters that do animation and architectural rendering will scale to the deskside within the next 5 years. Sure, these are not going to sell gazillions of PCs or MPPs in the next two weeks, but we will see an explosion of visualization-enabled reality simulations that will start showing up next to desktops and gaming joysticks (hopefully) near you Real Soon Now. I think back to my first bare board 8086 with 2kx16 of RAM and a similar amount of UV EPROM, and I start to giggle insanely when I realize that the 2GB USB key I toss in my pocket has more CPU juice than it did. None of which is meant to disagree with anything said. I think the most cogent point you both make is that money people have to see value in the same way that they grokked and then bought spreadsheets on PCs. Having a great analysis won't save or make money until some bright bulb figures out what to do with it besides play. -- Don Wilde no egg on my mortarboard, but I do work for a rather large commodity PC maker »

It's prone to off-by-one errors, that's why you haven't heard much about it. :D »

While I disagree with a few of his comments as regards Linux as Linux succeeding, issues of proprietary anything will deter companies like Dell from succeeding in selling Linux desktops. All of his comments are concerns Dell and other companies are weighing. M$ is already making 800-lb gorilla moves to counter the Ubuntu PC release, and Dell can't afford not to listen. Whether Dell continues to move forward in the Linux direction will depend on how these issues play out. DON'T count the fat gorilla out yet, guys. »