Hi,
you should be able to run the programs you mention on any of the
mainstream Linux distributions, especially when you are not scared
installing some extra bits and pieces. One of the main nuisances I met
recently is the requirement of libg2c for Fortran programs compiled with
g77 and dynamically linked - on opensuse 11.x, libg2c was hard to find
- but one could use the rpm from 10.3 and things were fine.
One reason I don't like apple is my lousy experience with hardware
maintenance. One I had an iBook G3. It took me to days, 50 screws to undo
(this is not an exaggeration) and 3-4 screw drivers I had never heard of
before only to replace the hard drive. Also the g++ compiler was twice as
slow under MacOSX than under Debian which I installed in parallel on the
same machine - 20min compile program (Xtools g++) vs. 10 min (Debian g++)
for some program.
It must have been a Freudian slip when I hit the laptop off a table so I
had reason to purchase an IBM thinkpad. On the thinkpad, hardware
maintenance is about the opposite of my experience with the iBook: every
screw on the outside is clearly labelled with numbers and even pictograms
so you know which one to undo when you want to replace Memory or the hard
drive or the keyboard - and they are only a few of them to achieve your
goal.
Tim
--
Tim Gruene
Institut fuer anorganische Chemie
Tammannstr. 4
D-37077 Goettingen
GPG Key ID = A46BEE1A
On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, 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
