If you have found Bill Scott's pages on Macs useful, you may find his
Ubuntu pages similarly useful: another reason to go with linux over
windows. There are also people creating rpm packages to easily install
the likes of coot on Fedora/RHEL/Centos, another well supported option.
Also, phenix, which seems to have significant popularity these days,
does not run on windows.
Engin
On 5/1/09 7:58 AM, Roger Rowlett wrote:
Well, Coot, O, Pymol, CNS, and CCP4i, as well as Open-EPMR all have
Windows versions. The main issues with a Windows workflow are (1) jobs
will run significantly slower than in Linux, and (2) the DOS command
shell is not as powerful as Linux, although it can be extended by
installing DOS versions of Linux commands and utilities. You will also
lose access to a number of Linux(Unix)-only XRD tools, but those are
getting fewer each year. It's also easier, more stable, and more
secure to set up a laboratory data server in Linux than in Windows.
You will also find that you can get excellent computing performance
out of fairly modest hardware in Linux compared to Windows.
I'm not sure there is much "institutional support" required for Linux
if you know how to install your own OS and software. All I need from
my networking people is a hole in the firewall for my MAC address and
SSH port. After that, there is not much for IT to do for me other than
stay out of the way. Ubuntu has made it a lot easier than it has been
to maintain your own Linux systems, but I'm still currently wedded to
Fedora. The main Linux headache is hardware support, especially
printers and graphics drivers for Nvidia cards, but even that is
relatively painless now.
Cheers,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger S. Rowlett
Professor
Colgate University Presidential Scholar
Department of Chemistry
Colgate University
13 Oak Drive
Hamilton, NY 13346
tel: (315)-228-7245
ofc: (315)-228-7395
fax: (315)-228-7935
email: rrowl...@mail.colgate.edu
Link,Todd M wrote:
My home institution, in effort to cut costs, is making an effort to
push those of us on Macs onto PCs. Up till now they have been very
generous via a lease program for computer hardware, but that is
changing given the current economics. The institution currently does
not support Linux so we are limited to Mac and Windows OS.
We certainly make use of William Scotts crystallography on OS X
(thanks so much!) so our main argument is that we would have far
more support “out there” for crystallography on the Mac than we would
have for on Windows. But to be fair (and hopefully bolster our
argument) I should find out if that is true. I did not find an equal
web support page for Windows.
A volunteer survey will be distorted (probably by Mac fanboys like
me) so I am asking for peoples best guesstimate as to what % use of
Mac, Windows, or Linux is out there for data processing and model
building. Our core programs are coot, o, pymol, cns, and ccp4 but we
certainly make occasional use of other crystallography programs out
there (solve, epmr...)
Also what are the relative crystallography support for Mac vs. Windows.
Thanks in advance.
Todd
--
Todd M. Link
Assistant Professor
MD Anderson Cancer Center
Univ. of Texas
(713) 834-6394
