There's one piece of software that does not run on a Mac. GRAPHent
I tried some years ago to port it to a Mac without success, that's the only reason I have a dead PC (*technically it has Windows on it but I call it dead as long as no linux is installed) in my office waiting to get some flavor of linux since about 1 year. As under linux I never had troubles compiling it. Regarding $ US versus Europe How frequently do you change your linux boxes ? I'm still running a Mac Laptop from 2004 which I bought for 2500$, only thing I had to do is replace the hard drive as the shipped 120 GB was way to small for my needs. It now sports a 500 GB drive and runs 10.6. So considering it's been running for 7.5 years now that brings the cost down to ~340$/year. I'm anticipating to use that Mac at least for another 3-4 years before I think it served my purposes well. Then in it's afterlife it will function as guest computer for people visiting us from Europe :-) A Mac mini with Zalman serves as stereo workspace together $1000, has been running three years now and it will surely continue to run for a few more years. Sure I also have the MacPro's there the $-tag is much higher but you also get a few more cores for your money and not everybody needs one of those monsters. Jürgen On Sep 29, 2011, at 10:55 AM, Dima Klenchin wrote: Simon Kolstoe wrote: Meanwhile I think windows is slowly improving as a crystallography platform - and Microsoft is perhaps no longer hated in principle - however the one student in our lab who opted to go the windows route seems very limited in the software he can run. I have a feeling that the lack of Windows software continues to be mostly due to the irrational animosity toward it rather than the platform-specific issues. After all, there seemed to be many developers who were happy to code for MacOS 7-9 but refused to release anything that runs in Windows. Meanwhile, that is the only platform we never hear about installation and dependencies issues. Given the large number of Windows versions of CCP4 downloaded, I assume this is not because nobody actually installs Windows software. - Dima ...................... Jürgen Bosch Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute 615 North Wolfe Street, W8708 Baltimore, MD 21205 Office: +1-410-614-4742 Lab: +1-410-614-4894 Fax: +1-410-955-2926 http://web.mac.com/bosch_lab/
