Re: [ccp4bb] which Linux workstation for crystallography to buy?

[Roger Rowlett]

I rarely spend more than $1000 US on a student crystallography workstation. I build my own, and upgrade motherboard/CPUs and/or graphics cards periodically, and re-use the case and other peripherals like hard drive, CD-ROMS, memory card readers, monitors, keyboards, mice, etc. if serviceable. An off-the-shelf Dell, HP, or Lenovo, or whatever machine would also be just fine, and can be just as affordable. What you must have is an NVidia graphics card (their Linux drivers are very good; ATI drivers are still problematic in Linux). You don't really need much of a graphics card if you are not considering stereo. Even an 8000-9000 series GT22x series GPU is more than sufficient to run Pymol, CCP4i, Coot, etc. I'm running Core2 quad or duo processors (pretty old technology) and they are fine. The next motherboard update might have a core i5 or i7 CPU, but really it's not all that critical. Flavors of Linux abound. I used to use Fedora, but got tired of the SELinux issues and some other hardware compatibility issues with hardware and software. I also tired of the pace of upgrades (every 6 months if you want to continue to get updates.) Just for something new, I migrated to Ubuntu, and it has been mostly hassle-free. I miss having a root account (although you can actually set on up if you wish, at least in 9.04) but otherwise Ubuntu is very crystallography-friendly. I found that the wine release in Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.04 will actually run CrysalisPro quite well, whereas Fedora 8 or 10 did not for some reason. Since we have an Oxford instrument in-house, this means we don't have to have a Windows machine to process data for pipelining into CCP4. Use whatever flavor of Linux you like and are familiar with, providing it runs all your software. If you have any doubt, you can always install a virtual machine and try out your favorite software there with your Linux distro of choice. That's how I found out that CrysalisPro would run in Ubuntu under wine but not under Fedora. The one nice thing about Ubuntu is that if you install a long-term release (like 10.04) you get update support for 3 years rather than 6-18 months for many other Linux distros. Cheers, Roger S. Rowlett Professor Department of Chemistry Colgate University 13 Oak Drive Hamilton, NY 13346 tel: (315)-228-7245 ofc: (315)-228-7395 fax: (315)-228-7935 email: rrowl...@colgate.edu On 10/12/2010 4:28 AM, 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/   **************************** 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 ***************************