Before getting openMosix

Before getting openMosix you might want to test your applications on a test environment. Then Clusterknoppix is exactly what you need. ClusterKnoppix is a Knoppix based bootable CD with an openMosix kernel. Without the need for reinstalling your current systems you can boot a couple of machines into an openMosix environment and test your applications. ClusterKnoppix provides you with a fully functional openMosix Terminal server from which you can pxe-boot other openMosix nodes.

With an operational ClusterKnoppix up and running you can run your own applications in this small test environment. If it works, you can continue installing a fully featured cluster.

Then , you must understand that openMosix is made up of a kernel patch and some user-space tools. The kernel patch is needed to make the kernel capable of talking to other openMosix-enabled machines on the network. If you download openMosix as a binary package (such as an rpm file), you don't even need to take care about the kernel patch because the kernel will be patched and compiled with the most common default options and modules for you.

If you do want to build your own kernel you will have to start from the vanilla source tree, not a source tree from some distribution since that will already have a number of patches in it that might result into conflicts.

The user-space tools are necessary in order to make an effective use of an openMosix-enabled kernel. They are needed to start/stop the migration daemon, to migrate jobs to perfromcertain nodes and other tasks which are usually accomplished with the help from our good old friend: the command line interface. About binary packages: the same as in the kernel patch goes for the user-space tools: if you install an rpm you don't need to care about compiling them or configuring anything; just let them install and run. That's all. Really :)