Hey fossil fortran programmer. I was testing out OpenSolaris 2008.05 snv_86 compatibility with different motherboards at work today, and on most of the motherboards (Asus motherboards) the NIC wasn't detected, but I struck gold with this motherboard:
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=9&l2=39&l3=299&l4=0&model=1564&modelmenu=1 The Asus DSBD-D12 Dual Quad Xeon. So far all of the hardware built into the motherboard (including onboard network cards and disk controllers, sound card, graphics card, etc) was detected right away on the first boot with snv_86 and everything seems to be working perfectly. There was absolutely no need to install any drivers!!! Just pop in the CD, and boot up from it and everything just works! Since you're doing biological computation research and want Windows backwards compatibility, this motherboard might be perfect for you to use for your project (you've got two Intel Quad Core Xeon CPU's- very fast stuff, and you can put a whopping 48 GIGABYTES OF RAM into this thing). And you can buy this motherboard for a little under $400 as you can see below: http://www.provantage.com/asus-dsbf-d12-2gbl~7ASU906J.htm I've noticed that the Solaris kernel seems to do better at heavy duty multi-threading than the default Linux kernel does, so if you get one of these motherboards and put OpenSolaris on it for your Fortran programming, you will probably get large performance benefits over using Ubuntu. Just my two cents. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
