Hi Anna:
I'd recommend Mac OS X or Linux over Windows as operating systems
compatible with crystallographic software. Linux flavors are a matter
of taste, but Ubuntu is popular (and free), and Gentoo is another one
worth looking at. Mac OS X uses a variant of FreeBSD unix, and you can
pretty much do anything with it that you can with Linux, so it comes
down to a matter of taste. If you go the Mac route, you can also use
Parallels or VMware to run windows and/or linux in a virtualized
environment nested within OS X should you need to, so you don't have
to give anything up. If you don't need stereo, I would go for the
largest iMac. That is now the fastest computer in my lab.
Bill
On Nov 17, 2008, at 1:00 PM, Anna S Gardberg wrote:
Dear list,
I haven't seen the "crystallographic computing platform" thread come
up for
a while, and I've got a chance to upgrade my desktop to a
workstation, so I
thought I'd ask the CCP4BB for advice on:
1. Mac vs. Linux (which flavor?) vs. Windows
2. Graphics cards
3. Displays
4. Processors - multiple processors, multiple cores? Speed?
About half of what I do involves ~1.0 A X-ray structures - data
processing,
rebuilding in Coot, refinement, and so forth - so my current desktop
(Optiplex GX745, Radeon X1300) machine drags on graphics sometimes.
I don't
seem to need stereo these days, for what it's worth.
Anybody have suggestions or specs they'd like to share? Thanks in
anticipation of your advice.
Regards,
Anna Gardberg
