Clusterix is a modular, live-cd Linux distro based off of Morphix, Knoppix, and Debian GNU/Linux. This means all you need to do is download the .iso, burn it to a cd, and reboot your computer. Clusterix will automatically start to boot without using your hard drive in anyway. Everything on your hard drive will be safe (hopefully :-).

Not only this, Clusterix features the openMosix clustering software, so you could easily setup a cluster without much effort. During the boot, Clusterix auto-detects each computer that boots into Clusterix on your network and automatically migrate processes from nodes needing resources to ones with plenty.

Also, for you parellel computing users, I have installed the LAM/MPI software, found here. According to the LAM/MPI website, it is "a high-quality open-source implementation of the Message Passing Interface specification, including all of MPI-1.2 and much of MPI-2. Intended for production as well as research use, LAM/MPI includes a rich set of features for system administrators, parallel programmers, application users, and parallel computing researchers."

The first release of Clusterix, 0.1-1a_pre-release "Cold Fusion," can be downloaded here. Features include the following:

• A fully updated base mod taken from the 0.4-1e and the 0.5-pre1 base releases of Morphix
• A graphical grub menu using the gfxboot-grub package
• The 2.4.22 kernel patched with the openMosix, Squashfs, Bootsplash, and Knoppix patches
• A fully functional Busybox Ash during initial boot for more options
• The use of Squashfs compressed base and main mods
• An upgraded mainmod (some packages have not been upgraded)
• Desktop environments, featuring Xfce and XPde.
• And all cluster management tools, including OpenMosixView.

Any code changes from Morphix Proper for Clusterix 0.1-1a_pre-release are released under the GNU General Public License. More information on this license can be found here . The distro is primarily untested and is considered to be in its alpha stage of development. Any and all who are willing to test this software will be appreciated and might be listed on this site (depending if they find and fix a bug for me ;-).

If you find any bugs in this release, please visit our BugTracker and submit a report.

WARNING: openMosix and the LAM/MPI clustering tools make this distro exceedingly insecure. Also, there is a root password set making it even more insecure. Please use with caution like making your cluster behind a firewall/router (or even no internet connection) and reset the root password after booting. This will limit most of the insecurities.

Any questions or comments about this site or the distro, please email me at g1powermac@yahoo.com.

December 28^th 2004

After quite a few months of college work, I haven't been able to do much Clusterix development until now. During the time I had though, I've been working on a "mini" cluster to replace the much older machines I had before. You can check my blog for more information on how I built the cluster.

But, since I have finished it up, I'm now able to start working on Clusterix once again, as the previous machines I used were completely inadequate. I'm now again working on the overlay filesystem once again, as mini_fo is buggy. I'm going to try unionfs, which seems quite promising. A new Clusterix release should be soon now if unionfs works as I'm expecting.

October 17^th 2004

Its now been just over a month past the first release and we already have a derivative! Bhartshorn has been working on his derivative called Implausibility for a bit now and has released it a couple of days ago. Its a gaming OS and thats about all I know about it at this moment. Click here to download.

Also, development for the next Clusterix release has been slow going. The main problem has been with the overlay filesystem (allows writing to a read-only filesystem). The current release is using translucency, but it is not working very well. I'm hoping that another one called mini_fo will work better.

September 12^th 2004

Well, its been a couple days now since the first release of Clusterix and I have to say the response has been great. There has been over 90 downloads from one mirror alone and I have been getting hits on this site from all over the world. However, with this, has come some testers who have already pointed out some stubborn bugs. For this, I have created the Clusterix BugTracker. So, if you find any bugs, please submit a report there.

September 9^th 2004

Today's the day, Clusterix has finally been released!! Thanks to ibiblio.org for the hosting. You can download the 0.1-1a_pre-release iso here.

July 14^th 2004
Mainmod updates are now almost finished. The new Morphix Installer has been installed correctly and is now working to how Alex wrote it, although it will need to be tweaked to work correctly with Clusterix. The first pre-release will be coming soon due to this good progress.

July 9^th 2004
Updating the mainmod is proving to be more work than expected. My main issue currently is with the new Morphix Installer and its dependency libgtk2.0-0 v 2.4.1 or higher. However, progress has been made with it (shutdown bug still not fixed ;-).

July 2^nd 2004
Work continues on the first release of Clusterix. The base mod is almost complete although it will be finished once I get the fix for the shutdown bug from Alex :-)

For more news on Clusterix, please visit my blog.