Hi,
Frankly, any vendor or assembler of PC's will do. Things to make sure to
have on your PC: an NVIDIA graphics board in order to get nice graphics
(their Linux drivers are fine; I don't know their current range of
boards, here we buy middle-range boards, not the cheapest ones that are
specific for cheap PC's and gaming in mind - so you'll need to check
this out on their web site). It also helps to have one or two Firewire
ports in case.
Our employer decides which brand of computers we must buy, until fairly
recently it was DELL (I have one of those), now it's LENOVO (formerly
IBM) and several colleagues have some of these and they are fine too. A
long time ago I had a workstation that had been put together by a local
shop from parts and that was fine too.
The choice is mainly whether or not you want a laptop or desktop. With a
laptop, you can have a second (large) monitor sitting on your desk, but
take the PC with you in the evening so that you can work at home if the
family allows you to (with a desktop and a suitable graphics board, you
can also have 2 monitors on your desk, this is what they have on the
beamlines at the ESRF).
Linux flavour: I personally do not like Ubuntu very much because it
seems you cannot have a root account, so that all admin has to be done
using sudo commands. Over here, the team in charge of computers and
networks decides for us which flavour of Linux has to be installed on
our machines. Until recently, we had Fedora Core (I think that with
"Secure Linux" that installed automatically these were very secure
computers for them because at first, everything was forbidden as a
security risk - like printing is not allowed; or accessing the internet
is not allowed etc; I have Fedora Core 8 which was fine as soon as the
Secure Linux protection was removed). 1 year ago, it was Scientific
Linux that had to be installed, the reason being that the updates are
not as frequent as those on Fedora Core (and also, the distro is
targetted towards scientific applications). The ESRF has SUSE Linux on
their computers, and they work fine.
Fred.
Benini Stefano (P) wrote:
Dear All,
I need to buy a Linux workstation to run crystallographic software and
graphics like ccp4, mosflm, coot., etc.,
Could you please suggest me a good combination of hardware and which
linux operating system to install (ubuntu?)? I can spend about 1500€
Technology evolves so fast that I really want to be up to date not to
be already late!
Thank you very much in advance
Stefano
Stefano Benini, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
_http://pro.unibz.it/staff2/sbenini/_
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Bio-organic Chemistry Laboratory
Faculty of Science and Technology
Free University of Bolzano
Piazza Università , 5
39100 Bolzano, Italy
Office (room K2.11): +39 0471 017128
Laboratory (room E.012): +39 0471 017901
Fax: +39 0471 017009
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