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Tim Gruene wrote:
May I actually ask why people use such old systems? An upgrade is easy,
pretty much for free or near free and with a properly partitioned disk
can be done without data loss.
Tim
In my case a fondness for the familiar,a bit of stubbornness,
a desire to have a reason before I do something (and yes,
I think now I could find a reason to upgrade)
May I turn the question on its head and ask, why would anyone want to
upgrade, except because the people developing the software did?
What new functionality has been introduced since 2001 that the
average crystallographer using a 32-bit machine would like to
use? (OK, firewire, disk sizes greater than 132 GB,
but those are fixed simply enough by installing the
latest kernel)
I have one Centos 2(?) system that I use for the office machine,
but the crystallography is mainly on RH7.3 boxes. And I really prefer
working on the 7.3 machines- they seem sleek and elegant and responsive
where the "new" one is clunky and unfamiliar.
For the crystallography machines running 7.3 I installed
yum and connected to the Fedora Legacy RH7.3 site so I would
automatically get security updates (but only security updates),
then settled back and did crystallography for the last four years
while others were frantically googling to find out how to get their
shiny new 64bit machines to run in 32-bit mode so they could use the
available software.
Now the wheel has gone full circle and I am struggling to get
my old machines to run new software while those brave pioneers
have solved all their problems and carry on effortlessly.
I'm sure there is a happy medium in there somewhere- don't take
every upgrade that comes along, but don't wait until binaries
are no longer available for your operating system.
Be not the first by which the new is tried (unless you love
linux and you're willing to take away from your research time
to develop procedures for the community) nor yet the last to
cast the old aside (unless you are a die-hard fan of retro-computing)
Ed
