Re: [ccp4bb] Computer hardware and OS "survey"

[iulek]

As this has not been cited, I decided to drop my opinion here.     Since last year I have a system which I consider almost complete to my needs (good crystallography computing and precise office tools). With "precise" I mean completely compatible file formats to students and wherever I go/send a document of mine. Unfortunately I find OpenOffice not to be very 100 % compatible to MSOffice, eg, formulae, which is an issue for a physical chemistry lecturer (and evetually crystallography presentations). I might be outdated yet I am still at openSuSE 11.0, so no experience with OpenOffice 3.0. Also, to be questioned about the xml format, so it would be nice to have some reference here (questionable as well, why not to "force" students and whoever else to use open format documents?). With crossover, again problems with formulae. For these cases I use VirtualBridges' win4lin. It is still a bit slow in my laptop, but I wonder about these 4 GB memo machines nowadays. It seems to me it has a much easier way to exchange files between win and lin and use less machine resources than virtual machines; but I would like to hear from someone who has extensive experiences with both. Nevertheless, limitatons are that it is compatible with winXP and below only and I cannot tell about its speed for development.     It is nice to use the 4 x 3 part of my wide screen to project the classes under XP, whilst on the remaining screen strand "top" shows me the several  processes running on the backgrond! Together with hibernate, yet 20+ days without rebooting the computer (no processes stopped) and using linux and whatever needed within XP, just whenever needed.     Other than that, crossover is very nice for "common" documents. For outlook (I cannot find a free alternative for the calendar with all functions therein), it is simply fine.     I hope this might be useful for someone else. Jorge ************************************************************************ Prof. Jorge Iulek, Ph. D. Protein Purification and 3D Structure Determination Group Department of Chemistry State University of Ponta Grossa - PR Brazil e-mail: iulek at interponta dot com dot br               iulek at uepg dot br ***************************************************************** This is the first time I see a discussion about this issue in science. To Answer to Pete...KDE and Gnome are user friendly and ergonomic windowing systems and nowadays major Linux Distributions make using these MUCH easier than some years ago. We have both, OSX and Linux workstations in our lab, but for computational needs you would have to buy a Mac Pro workstation that is expensive compared to the PC counterpart. Else on cheaper iMacs you can not do heavy calculations, the system is not made for this. Desktop needs like grant writing are greatly improved now with openOffice and for Microsoft fans with wine + Microsoft Office. But in the end I really have to agree with Nicholas. People tend to stigmatize Linux as a user unfriendly and unusable system for every day tasks. This is completely wrong and it would be nice if people would give a try to good distributions like Suse 11.1 or Ubuntu, that are very easy to install and maintain. Best wishes. Peter On Sat, 2 May 2009 11:50:56 +0100, mb1pja <p.artym...@sheffield.ac.uk> wrote: .. but OSX gives you Unix AND you can run Word /Powerpoint without rebooting. And you get a user-friendly ergonomic windowing system that kicks the **** out of XP/Vista/KDE/Gnome... best wishes Pete On 2 May 2009, at 11:32, Nicholas M Glykos wrote: Dear All, We confuse scientific computing with the individual scientists' computing needs: just because a scientist has to write a grant application using word, does not make windows a platform suitable for scientific computing (or anything else for that matter). Using computing machines for doing science boils down to actually using computing machines to compute things, and for that you need a proper open-source, production-oriented, stable programming environment, ie. GNU/Linux. What individual scientists prefer for satisfying their desktop needs is interesting, but, at least to my mind, largely irrelevant. My twopence, Nicholas -- Dr Nicholas M. Glykos, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Democritus University of Thrace, University Campus, Dragana, 68100 Alexandroupolis, Greece, Tel/Fax (office) +302551030620, Ext.77620, Tel (lab) +302551030615, http://utopia.duth.gr/~glykos/