Hi,
I'm a Fedora fan myself. I only recently needed to upgrade (i-e
reinstall) from FC8 to FC16 because the latest Coot wouldn't run on
FC8 anymore. I didn't upgrade to FC17 because NX (No Machine)
wouldn't work anymore. I guess that in terms of release stability
RHEL and Scientific Linux might be good choices. Support for older FC
versions is limited or non-existent, but if you buy a new machine
then you need to install a current OS version anyway. My major
problem is that now many people start using 64bit Linux, some
crystallographic programs are still distributed as 32bit only and
sometimes they don't run at all on a 64bit platform.
A lot of people in my Institute use Ubuntu. It is easy to configure
until you start wanting to customize your X-display (multiple
screens, stereo) then it becomes a nightmare.
Cheers,
Pedro.
At 16:45 17-01-2013, Roger Rowlett wrote:
IMO, unless you just like upgrading your OS on a frequent basis and
the migraines that go with it, choose some sort of LTS
(long-term-support) release. Currently I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
(good for 5 years), but CentOS or Mint would be good choices, too,
and that is what I considered when I upgraded from my last LTS
distribution. Ubuntu (at least for now) makes it easy to configure
hardware and is a popular known quantity for protein
crystallographic software. I had too many hardware compatibility
issues with Fedora about 5 years ago and gave up trying to maintain it.
Cheers,
_______________________________________
Roger S. Rowlett
Gordon & Dorothy Kline 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: [email protected]
On 1/17/2013 11:33 AM, David Roberts wrote:
I'm sorry to re-hash this issue, but I just wanted to know what the
present general consensus is on linux flavors. I teach a
crystallography class every 2 years, and I have a small cluster of
computers running fedora, but the deal is that by the time I get
around to my class, fedora has routinely gone up at least 2 levels
since my last upgrade, meaning that the latest software and things
are difficult at best to load on.
I'm OK with any linux, I just want one that will be able to run the
majority (if not all) of the typical crystallography packages (cns,
ccp4, coot, etc...). I also would like one that works well with
nfs and local file sharing. I can upgrade fedora, no problem, but
I thought I may branch out if others think there are better flavors out there.
Thanks so much
Dave Roberts
Industry and Medicine Applied Crystallography
Macromolecular Crystallography Unit
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