“The team at the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences wanted to give the computer a nickname – a name that would not only convey the super computer’s enormity in terms of size; but a name that would definitively link the super computer to NSU. Our mascot is the “shark” and the Megalodon, is the largest prehistoric shark known to man.”
Open source makes a lot of sense in rural areas and in third world countries. Lightweight and open source systems that are easy to use, and which allow normal users to become power users and contribute back to the open source community, can be ideal for countries like Cameroon, located in middle Africa.
Marc Stephan Nkouly, the manager of a successful Cameroon cyber cafe, is growing his business into a hub for education, entertainment, and entrepreneurialism, with the help of the up-and-coming open source operating system Peppermint. Open source technologies help to level the playing field and build a worldwide community of contributors to and users of tools that are providing new educational opportunities, resources, and jobs.
Puppy Linux 5.7 “Slacko” edition, a small and fast distribution built from and compatible with Slackware’s binary packages, has been released as the “flagship” Puppy release. From the release announcement: “Slacko Puppy is built from a ‘Puppy builder’ system named Woof, which can build a Puppy Linux distribution….
I love Docker, it’s a fantastic concept, and so far the execution and progress of the project has been flawless. I also love FreeBSD; FreeBSD is a clean and powerful system with advanced features like Dtrace, ZFS, and Jails. Combine the two and it sounds better than chocolate and peanut butter. With the recent version 0.9 release, Docker announced the infrastructure support to glue the two together, along with KVM, OpenVZ, Solaris Zones, and nearly any other environment for application isolation through an execution driver API.
The execution driver API support allows third parties to extend Docker to customize the environment of the container Docker builds. From what I can tell, the FreeBSD execution driver hasn’t been built yet, but I imagine it is not too far away. I envision that the (admittedly imaginary) FreeBSD driver would also take advantage of ZFS and the ability to create snapshots, clones, and the other ZFS goodness. The Docker FreeBSD driver could take the setup and possible complexity out of building and releasing FreeBSD Jails, opening up powerful technology to a wider audience.
