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> like many other groups, we are currently facing the need > to move from an aging SGI/Alpha cluster to a more modern > computing environment. The obvious alternatives to choose from > are Linux, OSX or Windows. We are aiming at solving interesting structures > rather than at developing software -- and yes, we only have a limited > support from IT professionals. [snip] > 1. MS Windows: > While many people would probably exclude Windows right away, > I am especially interested in collecting opinions about this option. > > True, a Windows box can never be a full replacement for a Unix > workstation. However, many pieces of software (not least the CCP4/CCP4i) > are perfectly usable under Windows! The main advantage in our case, > and in most other places, probably, is that nearly all students use/own > PCs > (desktops or laptops) already. I'd say (from the perspective of a ~5th year phd student, so take this with a grain of salt), that windows is probably not a good choice for students. Even if you're not interested in developing software (as you mentioned above), encouraging students to install binaries and click on things tends to encourage treating the programs as "magic black boxes" (needless to say, this should be discouraged). For more experienced crystallographers, this is probably not an issue; but I'd definately recommend installing from source code for students (I'd also recommend reading the source code along with the references and documentation for any non-trivial program that you're unsure about what it's doing, or why it's not working). > With Windows, there exist ways and tools that provide > modalities typical for unix environments -- how usable are > all these? How usable is cygwin? MinGW and cygwin are reasonably usable in my experience, but porting from unix to cygwin (builds and shell scripts) may cause a few problems. > 3. Linux: > Many advantages and one big concern: the difficulty of setting up. Well, there have been quite a few messages stating that linux setup has gotten fairly easy; I can't do much more than echo that. However, any difficulties that do arise are most likely going to occur with getting the graphics card happy (to do stereo and other visualization). Your milage may vary... Pete Pete Meyer Fu Lab BMCB grad student Cornell University
