Hello,
I've heard a little (very little) about having more than one processor on a MOBO to increase speed. Also about stacking MOBOs to achieve the same effect. I have several older machines lying around in various states of repair and was hoping I could put them together to make one decent box. Can anyone direct me to a site that shows me how to do this? I've done a cursory search but only turned up MOBOs with multi processors which can be purchased from the manufacturer. They seem to be anything but cheap. Thank you for your input and ideas.

I have never hear of 'Motherboard Stacking', but it sounds like you may be referring to something like a Beowulf Cluster.

In a beowulf (http://www.beowulf.org/), an operating system is installed on each machine, and a number of pieces of software are used to allow each machine to do part of the processing for the programs being run so that they behave like a single faster machine.

Linux is frequently used in these sorts of applications, though it is probably possible to find similar software for windows.

You should also note that even with a dual CPU system.
You must buy the software that can take advantage of the rig.
Windows Does NOT ..
Windows XP Pro and 2K pro are required for the dual support.

None of the Home additions support two or more cpu's

So Unless you intend to buy some high end software.

Just get or build yourself a Faster system

Yikes! It sounds like the ends would not justify the means. I think I'll just stick with gradually tweaking my small home network.

Thank you very much Pave Spectre and Rick for your input. BTW the boewulf site is great. I have several flavors of linux that i'd like to try out on a cluster just for fun. Maybe over Christmas break.

Install the Linux, Join us on the Dark Side mwuuhahahahahaha! :D

Kewl! thanx I think I will. Any recommendations as to flavors? I have Mandrake 9.0 (tried 9.2 but it killed my cdrom), Suse 7.0, and Slackware 7.0 :cool:
BTW is there more than one way to compile a kernel? I would like to upgrade the kernel on whichever install I do but don't know how. Tried it once and it didn't work out (putting it mildly). I now just refer to that as "the Incident". :rolleyes:

Slackware is good. There are very few major changes in the way things are configured between versions, so you could go from an early version to a brand new version with very little difference in installer apearance or cofiguration method.

Compiling a kernel depends on distros. A few distro's require that you use their specially patched kernel. With Slack you just download your preferred kernel source from kernel.org and then you have two options to compile.
The completely manual option, where you copy file and make links to the compiled kernel and hope you got it right, or the slightly automatic version that does the copying and linking for you and backs up your existing kernel so that if you modify lilo.conf you can boot to the old working kernel if the new one fails.
The automatic method for the 2.6 series kernel is even easier than the for the 2.4 series kernel.

I don't know how many kernel compiles I have been through tweaking things but you soon learn what changes break the system. The key is primarily to know what hardware you have installed, not just video card or sound card make, but knowing which motherboard chipset or USB driver(s) will be required, that way you can look at the description of a major kernel option and usually decide right there if it's required or not.

Hey thanks. I'll give Slack a whirl this weekend.