Best Linux distro for crunching?

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When I referrred to the PCLinux MiniMe as being "advanced" those were not my words but the words used by the PCLinux website in referring to their MiniMe product.

I was specifically referring to 'bare bones' in case readers thought PCLinuxOS didn't have a fully functional DE. It's 'stripped' of non-essential stuff which is what you want for a pure crunching box. The only reason they call it "advanced" is that they really want users to get all the standard stuff in a standard install rather than have them come back complaining that they don't have the full gamut of apps you would expect on a fully outfitted machine.

In an earlier message in this thread, I posted a link to an installation howto which shows quite a bit of the disk partitioning stuff. Yes you can accept defaults and let the installer carve up the disk for you but I would strongly suggest you do what is shown in the howto and select the custom option. It's a full GUI process of creating partitions, selecting the type of filesystem you want, sizing them to your heart's content (dragging a slider) and selecting mount points from drop down menus. Sure, you need to know that you should have a least root, swap and home partitions (as is mentioned in the howto) and that root and home should be of type 'ext4', whilst the swap partition is of type 'linux swap'. If you play around with the options you find on these screens you will discover that it's a pretty simple procedure to get exactly what you want. If you make a mistake you can 'cancel' with a single click and go back to the start to try again. And, as you intimated, the first time you try something new and unfamiliar, it's bound to seem more difficult than it actually is.

I'd like to address a couple of individual points.

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Poking around I realized that there were two "configure options": 1. Configure your desktop and 2. Configure your computer.

"Configure your computer" is also known as the PCC (PCLinuxOS Control Centre) which is a really nice GUI way to configure a lot of (but not all) things on the system immediately after installation. You should always use this first to set up what you can. "Configure your Desktop" is a tool specific to KDE configuration. In most cases, the default configuration of KDE is quite satisfactory but if you want to change the look and feel of your KDE desktop and tweak a few things, this is the tool to use.

There is a very small amount of duplication between the two - setting the timezone is certainly one. You actually get asked what your BIOS clock is set to (UTC or local) and you get asked to set the timezone during the first reboot after the install. I used to set the BIOS clock to local but now I use UTC because I read somewhere that there are bugs in handling daylight saving correctly in some localities that are avoided with a UTC setting. I also select the option to use NTP (with an appropriate time server from a drop down list) to keep the time correct and it works really well on all hosts.

So the basic steps are I use are:

• * Install the OS,
  * Reboot,
  * Use PCC to configure things associated with the entire machine including static IP address,
  * Use the CLI to edit /etc/hosts /etc/sysconfig/network /etc/apt/sources.list (you can easily do this last one later by GUI from within Synaptic),
  * Logout and immediately log back in to pick up the above config changes,
  * Use Synaptic to mark and apply all updates and extra stuff you want to install (including things like hardware drivers that weren't installed originally - like drivers for AMD GPUs),
  * Use PCC again (Hardware -> Video) if an AMD fglrx driver has been installed. This will 'see' the proprietary driver and ask you if you want to use it. Click 'yes',
  * Reboot again to ensure that all configuration and updates are fully operational, and finally,
  * Use the "Configure your Desktop" icon to explore all the things you can tweak to make your desktop look and feel the way you want it to.
  

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During the install I do not recall asking to provide a "hostname".

You aren't asked, a default is used which you need to deal with manually. It's something missing from the install procedure but fairly easy to rectify once you know how. You can use the hostname command to set a hostname but it won't survive a reboot. There is a file called "network" that lives in /etc/sysconfig. If you add a line at the top of the file saying "HOSTNAME=xxxx" then the name you choose there will become permanent.

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Yes you can do this from the command line, but a "man hostname" produces nothing. If fact a man of the basic Linux command line commands do not exist, i.e., ls, ping, df, etc. This is a loss for the new person running Linux.

This is in keeping with the philosophy of MiniMe. We are talking about a group of machines dedicated to crunching. Within that group, you can nominate one machine from which you will control the group. You could install the standard version of PCLinuxOS on that machine and I think you will have the man pages as part of that bigger install. I don't know that for certain as I've put the MiniMe version on everything. If I want to view a man page, I use an online man page service like this one.

If you want to view a man page installed on your machine, you have to open a terminal session and use a (shock, horror) CLI command of 'man xxxx' where xxxx is the name of the command in question. If it's a multi-page document, you need to know how to manipulate the pager that's doing the displaying of the information. For someone learning, I think it's easier to find and browse the online html pages using a standard browser of their choice. If you check out the link I provided you'll see a variety of ways to find info including a search box where you can type in the command name and get not only the command but also closely related stuff. When you actually open the html page, the presentation seems to be superior to the standard display in a terminal session.

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The default install produced the following output from a "df":
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 12G 2.5G 8.7G 23% /
/dev/sda6 131G 251M 131G 1% /home

What. A default install give 12 gig to "/" and 131 gig to /home. Really. I know there is a way to modify partioning during install but again a new guy would not necessarily have the ability to do this without much effort. I would not run with these defaults.

I would (for a crunching box) since there's plenty of room for the OS to grow with only 23% used. I've used around 5 - 7 GB for the root partition for years and never had problems. I want to have all my spare space for user files on /home. If you ever need to reinstall the OS, you will be able to leave everything in /home completely untouched.

In any case, as mentioned earlier, selecting custom partitioning and getting what you want size-wise is quite simple and straight forward.

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I had to hunt up a way to disable the touchpad on my Dell. There is a app/prog to do this and I installed it but you have to know this. In Ubu it is part of the options for mouse.

Try opening PCC -> Hardware and under "Configure Mouse and Keyboard" there is a "Setup pointer device (mouse and touchpad)". I don't have any touchpads so I've never used this.

If you don't get any joy there, try opening "Configure your Desktop" and select "Startup and Shutdown" in the System Administration section at the bottom of the page. On the menu at the left, click "Service Manager" and under "Startup Services" you will see a "KDE touchpad enabler daemon" which is enabled by default. Try unticking the box and see if that does what you want. I always disable a number of these services that I know I wont need for crunching.

There are a few other very useful things to know for improving the setup. Also there's a couple more hints for running BOINC. I'll deal with them in a future post.