Anyone have good websites(or reading material) to share for an absolutely raw Linux dummy? I have installed it, and gone no further (except playing some games).
I want to build my own Beowulf, I have all the pieces, but no knowledge. Hell, I can’t even figure out how to get my programs installed (though I just started reading about Glint, and will be trying that next).
All the sites I’ve seen so far assume some level of familiarity, and there seem to be hundreds of sites; can anyone save me trudging through them all looking for the right stuff? Remember I’m extremely stupid, so give me good links/books and use small words.
I one piece of advice:
Don’t rush yourself. Spend time learning the OS and getting a good grounding in the basics before moving on to something complicated like beowulf.
linuxnewbie.org is good. So is linux.com. Also, take some time to browse around and do some reading at www.linuxdoc.org - the linux documentation project. Lots and lots of good info.
As for books, there are dozens of good ones. I suggest Sam’s Teach Yourself Linux in 24 hours.
I would definitely start by reading a few books and have a linux system set up for the explicit purpose of experimenting with that I’m not worrying about wrecking. Reading howto’s and man pages is fine when you have specific problems in mind, but you really don’t want to spend hours upon hours staring at a screen just reading general stuff.
The book I’ve got is called Running Linux by Welsh, Dalheimer, Kaufman published by O’Reilly. It’s quite good, I read it cover to cover. Once I finished that I had enough knowledge to do most general stuff and an ability to find more detailed info on the net. There are lots of other good books out there, choose one that’s big and touches on lots of topics. Then read the whole thing.
I would love to have my own cluster too, but that is pretty advanced stuff. There are books on how to do that too.
I don’t know what level you are at, but I recently downloaded RED HAT Linux from their web site and it installed very easily. That could be a way you can get a LINUX system going to play with, before you go more lower-level techie genius routes.
First, thanks Biblio, I wasn’t sure if I’d posted in the most appropriate forum.
As for the cluster, from what I’ve read, the Oscar software makes it easy- assuming you know some linux already.
I’m getting there slowly- part of my problem, I’ve found, is that I’m reading manuals from THE WRONG VERSIONS of the distribution, no wonder the stuff I was trying didn’t work!- thanks to Joe Cool for the excellent link.
I have some of the software I need installed now, and running well, now I just need to get a good knowledge base so I can start the network and crank up the Wulf. Company upgrades computers fairly regularly, I have 12 pentium ATX boards to get started with.
thanks for all the help- I’ll post again later if I get it all working.
Yes, Beowulf and OSCAR are essentially distributed computing clusters. As for what it can be used for, well, I suppose any computing task that can be efficiently done in parallel would be a good candidate for development as a cluster application. I’m not all that familiar with OSCAR, but I know Beowulf has everything you need to write your own distributed apps; drivers, APIs, you name it.