While Linux has certainly taken off in the high-performance supercomputing labs of academic institutions, commercial enterprises, and government facilities around the world, many of the supercomputers out there are using home-grown Linuxes and are self-supported by fleets of nerds who, in many cases, know as much or more about Linux than the commercial Linux suppliers. That said, this is a cost and both Red Hat and Novell and their server partners want to get more installations among HPC shops.
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The HPCC 8 Pack bundle is available starting August 22. IBM did not announce pricing, but it should be considerably less per node than the cost of a basic SLES 10 license, which costs $349 list from Novell for a basic subscription with one year of Web and telephone support. The IBM HPCC 8 Pack has Big Blue offering Level 1 tech support and does not have telephone support, but does include patches for the Linux stack and for security updates as well as online delivery of those patches and any ancillary software.
While most computer science students learn skills on x86 servers, their counterparts at the University of Arkansas will now get hands-on experience on a new IBM system z900 running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise.
The main problem is that all of the files on the site are in the so-called Click 'N Run (or CNR) format, which is a quick and easy way to install Linux apps -- when the Linux distro supports CNR, that is. Unfortunately for ASUS (and Eee PC users), the Eee PC's Xandros distribution does not. As some on the EeeUser forums point out, however, Xandros now actually owns Linspire (the company behind CNR), so it would seem to be entirely possible that CNR support could be coming in a future version of Xandros, but that still doesn't explain ASUS putting the cart before the horse like this.
The Eee PC 900 was released, then the 901, 904, 904HD each of them coming with Windows and Linux variations in multiple colours and with more options and extras than you could shake a fistful of sub-notebooks at. There were Atom and non-Atom CPU options and all this without mentioning the assorted peripherals like the Eee PC writing pad or Wii-alike motion controller.