Tim,
it's a bit unfair to compare a MacBook with a ThinkPad. Obviously they
don't play in the same league. The MacBood rivals the Vaio for
flashiest lifestyle machine whereas the ThinkPad is a serious worker.
All three of them do crystallography just fine.
Andreas
Tim Gruene wrote:
Hi,
you should be able to run the programs you mention on any of the
mainstream Linux distributions, especially when you are not scared
installing some extra bits and pieces. One of the main nuisances I met
recently is the requirement of libg2c for Fortran programs compiled with
g77 and dynamically linked - on opensuse 11.x, libg2c was hard to find
- but one could use the rpm from 10.3 and things were fine.
One reason I don't like apple is my lousy experience with hardware
maintenance. One I had an iBook G3. It took me to days, 50 screws to
undo (this is not an exaggeration) and 3-4 screw drivers I had never
heard of before only to replace the hard drive. Also the g++ compiler
was twice as slow under MacOSX than under Debian which I installed in
parallel on the same machine - 20min compile program (Xtools g++) vs. 10
min (Debian g++) for some program.
It must have been a Freudian slip when I hit the laptop off a table so I
had reason to purchase an IBM thinkpad. On the thinkpad, hardware
maintenance is about the opposite of my experience with the iBook: every
screw on the outside is clearly labelled with numbers and even
pictograms so you know which one to undo when you want to replace Memory
or the hard drive or the keyboard - and they are only a few of them to
achieve your goal.
Tim
--
Tim Gruene
Institut fuer anorganische Chemie
Tammannstr. 4
D-37077 Goettingen
GPG Key ID = A46BEE1A
On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Stephen Weeks wrote:
Dear BBers,
I would like to treat myself to a new laptop which will be my
primary use machine (i.e I want to run all the usual crystallography
packages, hopefully write a few papers, watch Lost online and pay the
bills when needs be). Although I am an ardent Apple fan I find it
difficult to justify forking out $2000 plus for a MacBook Pro so as an
alternative I've been looking into buying a machine running Linux.
During my comparison shopping studies I came across the small company
System76 (http://system76.com) that sell reasonably priced machines
that come with Ubuntu 8.1 (Intrepid Ibex) preinstalled. My two
questions are (i) Does anybody have any experience with machines from
this company ? (ii) Other than the Bltwish and 64bit issues can I
(compile) install and run CCP4, Arp/Warp, XDS Mosflm, Coot and Pymol
on this version of Ubuntu ? I don't mind tinkering around a bit to get
things to work as that's part of the fun.
Cheers Stephen
--
Stephen Weeks, Ph. D.
Drexel University College of Medicine
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Room 10102 New College Building
245 N. 15th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19102
Phone: (+) 215-762-7316
Fax: (+) 215-762-4452
--
Andreas Förster, Research Associate
Paul Freemont & Xiaodong Zhang Labs
Department of Biochemistry, Imperial College London
