Kwok-Room Linux

With the wealth of unix knowledge harboured by JCN and its members, there was a voracious appetite to use the Kwok room PCs for more than WYSIWYG document processing; also, in terms of the Supercomputer project, there are a number of advantages with having a large number of identical machines under. The effort to build a replacement has gathered apace over the summer, so that currently, we have a working system with most of the issues resolved.

To try out the system, download our standard floppy image from the server, copy it onto a floppy (1.44M) diskette (using dd or RAWRITE.EXE), place it into the floppy drive of a Kwok PC, and reboot. Allow the bootup to select the default system (`Gilmour'), then, while it's booting, admire the artwork. After a while, the screen will present you with a login prompt.

At this prompt, you should type in your zeus username (and password, when prompted for that); it will then give you the default windowmanager and working environment, which you can use to play with to your heart's content.

So what's so great about this? Well...

The JCN Kwok Linux system allows users whose courses or research require Unix or XWindows to use the Jesus Computer Centre.
The JCN Linux system, as most other Unix systems, allows remote use of the computers. Therefore, users may use the computational power of the fast machines that we now have from their department, as well as the user sitting in front of the screen. And the best thing is that both can do this at once!
The system developed is easy, or possibly even trivial, to manage.
The system allows for large parallel computations to be carried out; in a recent benckmark, using real-world astrophysical `C' code, each PC was 3.5 times as fast as a Sun Ultra 1 and 1.7 times as fast as a Sun Ultra 10.
It's nice to use. It's significantly nicer than any other environment I've used for work or play.

The Kwok linux system actually comes in three flavours. Gilmour is the full-fledged linux desktop that most people will want to use. However, at the bootup menu, there are other choices (even excepting Windows NT, of course). There are two other options: `Benson' functions as a simple X terminal for the user at the console (i.e. it allows remote hosts to manage the X session; this is useful for people who want to use machines at their departments); O2 is functionally equivalent to the e-mail terminals that are dotted around college.

More information on the technical side of the current incarnation of Kwok Linux is available here.