Just some thoughts on location selection and cost...
Cheers
Jason
Gareth Williams wrote:
I have a Knoppix 3.2 CD here... and it has distcc 1.1 and gcc 3.2.3 (as someone else posted I think?). I have a suspicion that maybe this would be close enough? Is it at least worth a try before messing around with livecd-ng? IMHO Knoppix hardware detection is second to none (just 10 minutes ago it fixed a faulty CD-ROM drive I was giving up hope of ever working properly - stuck in a Knoppix CD and it just goes, lol). If we use Knoppix, I think there is more chance it will work on all the different (and weird) machines people bring... comments?
Secondly, the matter of the charge. $20 seems a bit much to a poor student like me, but if you set the charge at less for people who just bring a machine to help with compiling, then I will do that, and just not bring the machine I was thinking of installing on. I'm not too bothered whether I get gentoo or not, after all I'm sure I'd have no trouble installing it myself at home. For me, the real value of this is the social aspect (if you call sitting in a room with a bunch of other geeks social, heh ;-) , and to see something cool (distcc. an installfest where all the machines help each other, woohoo). What I'm saying is that even if you guys were setting up a mosix cluster and intending to use it to calculate PI to a billion decimal places, I'd still come ;-)
So this then raises the question, should we in fact charge any less for people who aren't getting installs? If others are like me (which of course they aren't, necessarily) and get the same utility from both (installing or not installing), then perhaps we should have one fee for everyone?
Thirdly, I once heard the OSTC described as being little larger than a corridor - is the correct? (I've never been there). If so then it may not be ideal... I would even offer to have it at my place (ie. therefore no charges for anyone) - we have gaming LANs here sometimes, and I know for a fact that if stretched we can fit 9 people + machines in the house, and another 9 in the garage (yes, we have done it before ;-) ... with a long bit of cat5 between the two. But that's also less than ideal ;-)
I don't want to undermine the effort to support the OSTC, and indeed if it is a suitable venue, then I think we should hold it there. However, my personal feeling is that the standard $10 per person fee would be about right. Of course ultimately it's up to David, he has the right to set the fee at whatever he likes. So I would like to hear some comments from him on the matter.
Cheers, Gareth
On Saturday 14 June 2003 11:13, Nick Rout wrote:
I am fiddling with the gentoo package livecd-ng which is supposed to be able to create a custom boot cd with arbitrary packages included (ie distcc). I can see now why it is in the "unstable" branch of gentoo - it doesn't work"out of the box", but I seem to be getting somewhere with some help from forums.gentoo.org. Will report back later.
If this works we should be able to boot all the distcc server machines off identical cd's and there should be no problems with gcc or library version differences.
N
