[gentoo-user] Linux and the Higgs

[gentoo-user] Linux and the Higgs

[Frank Peters]

Linux was used to find the Higgs:

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/w2ly6/new_boson_found_by_linux/

I am not really surprised, but what does disturb me is that the distros
used in the effort were mainly "Scientific Linux and Ubuntu."

Where was Gentoo?

Somebody had better counsel these scientists to be better able to discern
the quality of a Linux distro.

Frank Peters

[gentoo-user] Re: Linux and the Higgs

[Grant Edwards]

On 2012-07-05, Frank Peters <frank.peters@comcast.net> wrote:
> Linux was used to find the Higgs:
>
> http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/w2ly6/new_boson_found_by_linux/
>
> I am not really surprised, but what does disturb me is that the
> distros used in the effort were mainly "Scientific Linux and Ubuntu."
>
> Where was Gentoo?
>
> Somebody had better counsel these scientists to be better able to
> discern the quality of a Linux distro.

I know you're probably being ironic, but...

Scientific Linux is a distro put together by Fermilab, CERN, et alia
for doing the exact type of stuff that they do at CERN.  Maybe an
argument could be made for moving SL from a RHEL base to a Gentoo
base, but trying to get them to abandon SL probably isn't going to be
easy.

The target market for Ubuntu just doesn't seem to be very compatible
with the Gentoo, so that's going to be a tough sell also.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I invented skydiving
                                  at               in 1989!
                              gmail.com            

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Linux and the Higgs

[Florian Philipp]

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Am 05.07.2012 23:22, schrieb Grant Edwards:
> On 2012-07-05, Frank Peters <frank.peters@comcast.net> wrote:
>> Linux was used to find the Higgs:
>>
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/w2ly6/new_boson_found_by_linux/
>>
>> I am not really surprised, but what does disturb me is that the
>> distros used in the effort were mainly "Scientific Linux and Ubuntu."
>>
>> Where was Gentoo?
>>
>> Somebody had better counsel these scientists to be better able to
>> discern the quality of a Linux distro.
> 
> I know you're probably being ironic, but...
> 
> Scientific Linux is a distro put together by Fermilab, CERN, et alia
> for doing the exact type of stuff that they do at CERN.  Maybe an
> argument could be made for moving SL from a RHEL base to a Gentoo
> base, but trying to get them to abandon SL probably isn't going to be
> easy.
> 
> The target market for Ubuntu just doesn't seem to be very compatible
> with the Gentoo, so that's going to be a tough sell also.
> 

Yeah, just think about the timeframe for which they support their
current distribution: You can keep your SL-6 distributions running until
2020 and still get security fixes! Try to do this with Gentoo while
keeping binary compatibility!

And I guess binary compatibility is rather important when you consider
global Grid systems. When every lab and every scientist might have their
own set of tools linked against libraries in your distro (often lacking
a proper build system), you definitely don't want to tell them to
"revdep-rebuild" their cluster...

SL and Gentoo are both pretty awesome distros but they don't really have
much in common.

Regards,
Florian Philipp


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