Laptop default display (frame buffer) output

Several days ago, my laptop did something awful to me, it defaulted to use VGA1 (display with D-SUB adapter) rather than LVDS1 (laptop's screen), even before X! (runlevel 3). Apparently something is wrong about frame buffer config (or ACPI).

Adding:
video=LVDS1:e acpi=force
to kernel arguments parameters (quite) solved the problem, the mis-configured display happened much less frequently :D

USB Flash Boot Frenzy: Puppy Linux

Adding Puppy Linux to syslinux entries is pretty simple: copy all the files to a directory inside your flashdrive, add an entry for Puppy Linux.
# mount -o loop puppy*.iso /mnt/puppy 
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/flashdrive 
# cp -vfr /mnt/puppy /mnt/flashdrive

Puppy's entry should look like to this:
label puppy 
kernel /puppy/vmlinuz 
append initrd=/puppy/initrd.gz pmedia=usbflash 

Luckily, Puppy can find its own compressed SquashFS (unlike Ubuntu) :D

(Part of) My Beowulf Cluster

These 6 boards bearing i3 540 (quite old procie) are part of Beowulf cluster I am working on. I borrowed them from my professors (here and here). The cluster will include 10 more E7500.

The cluster will do computation on multi-dimensional Monte Carlo integral, in which more processing nodes will allow more data samples and faster results. It utilizes basic cluster thingies: GNU/Linux (WattOS and SalixOS) for the operating systems; NFS, OpenSSH, some home-brewed scripts for management; and OpenMPI as parallel programming library.


She's majestic, isn't she?

She's gonna be my girlfriend for quite some time :)