Open Source

For those of us that rebuild our computer operating systems every few months, we’re in luck. FOG, a free, Open Source ghosting solution has been released. You can create ghost images of a clean OS, to rebuild from at a later date. This makes things a tad easier, and cheaper than re-installing from scratch. As you can see from the official description below, it supports Windows XP and Vista.

Fog is a Linux-based, free and open source computer imaging solution for Windows XP and Vista that ties together a few open-source tools with a php-based web interface. Fog doesn’t use any boot disks, or CDs; everything is done via TFTP and PXE. Also with fog many drivers are built into the kernel, so you don’t really need to worry about drivers (unless there isn’t a linux kernel module for it). Fog also supports putting an image that came from a computer with a 80GB partition onto a machine with a 40GB hard drive as long as the data is less than 40GB.

Fog also includes a graphical Windows service that is used to change the hostname of the PC, restart the computer if a task is created for it, and auto import hosts into the FOG database. The service also installs printers, and does simple snap-ins.

The open source clustering project, openMosix, has officially closed down. openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering which turns a network of ordinary computers into a supercomputer. The software was a spin off of the commercially available MOSIX. The close was probably due to lack of interest or lack of programmers supporting the project. OpenSSI seems to be the openMosix alternative.

The openMosix clustering software let you run a cheap super computer, letting general applications use CPU cycles from other computer connected to the cluster. If your main cluster node’s CPU was busy, it would forward other threads to a computer on the cluster network.

The software is still available here. http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmosix/