Stephen, Its not my intention to woo you to buy an apple product.
I bought an ibook (NOT the macbook pro) more than 5 years ago (1.2 GHz, upgraded to 1.25 GB RAM and 160 GB hard drive). Still as fast as many new pc based laptops (I have two of these in my home but rarely use them). I have everything on my ibook. Latest packages of CCP4, Phenix, mosflm (I never used it on my laptop), coot, Pymol, of course microsoft office, photoshop, several of the acrobat products etc etc etc .... My ibook is the chief DVD player of my family (I have two little girls and you can imagine the demand!). I do everything on this machine starting from the structure factor file to publication of the paper (indeed, I could get three cover illustrations prepared on this machine!). Indeed, I have many many more good experiences about this machine. Finally, you need not spend $2000 but around 1300-1500 USD should be good enough to get a machine that can do all your crystallographic, publication and online activities including bill pay and filing your TAX returns.....oops, I should do it now! Good luck in making a proper decision. Anthony On Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:47:18 -0500, Stephen Weeks wrote > Dear BBers, > I would like to treat myself to a new laptop which will be my > primary use machine (i.e I want to run all the usual crystallography > packages, hopefully write a few papers, watch Lost online and pay the > bills when needs be). Although I am an ardent Apple fan I find it > difficult to justify forking out $2000 plus for a MacBook Pro so as an > alternative I've been looking into buying a machine running Linux. > During my comparison shopping studies I came across the small company > System76 (http://system76.com) that sell reasonably priced machines that > come with Ubuntu 8.1 (Intrepid Ibex) preinstalled. > > My two questions are (i) Does anybody have any experience with machines > from this company ? (ii) Other than the Bltwish and 64bit issues can I > (compile) install and run CCP4, Arp/Warp, XDS Mosflm, Coot and Pymol on > this version of Ubuntu ? I don't mind tinkering around a bit to get > things to work as that's part of the fun. > > Cheers Stephen > > -- > Stephen Weeks, Ph. D. > Drexel University College of Medicine > Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology > Room 10102 New College Building > 245 N. 15th St. > Philadelphia, PA 19102 > > Phone: (+) 215-762-7316 > Fax: (+) 215-762-4452 ------------------------------------------------- Anthony Addlagatta, Ph.D. Ramanujan Fellow and Senior Scientist Center for Chemical Biology Indian Institute of Chemical Technology [IICT] Tarnaka, Hyderabad- 500007, INDIA Tel:+91-40-27191583 Url: http://www.iictindia.org/zacb/Dr.%20Anthony.aspx
