Today I was setting up a distributed computing environment. Because my HP Xe3 notebook has only 256MB of RAM and an 5400 RPM harddisk, I had to find a solution how can I "extend" my workstation type resources.

I'm running very large scale of programs at the same time: Openoffice.org, Evolution, Firefox, ArgoUML, Gaim, Gnome Terminal, MySQL, Apache2 with PHP and Drupal and "of course" Gnome (the prefered desktop environment of Fedora). These stuffs are not too lightweight in the view of 256megz.

OpenMosix is a good solution for SSI-type clusters, but Fedora doesn't support it. I've tried to meet ATI's fglrx driver and openMosix, but fglrx doesn't work with oM, I dunno why.

So, I have to see some tricks around doing some remote execution and redirect the X-based programs' output to my notebook. I found a nice tool designed for these situation called expect. Here's my expect code:

#!/usr/bin/expect
spawn ssh aries@10.0.0.101
expect "aries@10.0.0.101\'s password: " {
  send -- "foobar\r"
  expect "Last login: *"
  send -- "export DISPLAY=10.0.0.3:0.0\r"
  expect "*bash*"
  send -- "screen -d -m firefox\r"
  expect "*bash*"
  send -- "logout\r"
}

It's a bit lame I know, but it's do the job and that's whats matter. So, I replaced my icon's command to distribute the heavyweight applications to the Mindworks' workstations.

Do you know any other good solution?