My 0.02 on this as always. For monitors, I was worried about this at
first. I replaced all my SGI units (with what was good graphics and CRT
displays), and I worried about getting a new monitor and losing
information with different stereo options.
I bought zalman monitors, and they work fine. They have little quirks,
but overall for the price it was a great deal (a one time price for
the monitor, no issues with software or hardware as you can just pick up
free glasses at your local 3D movie showing).
Now the surprise. Going from a "dim" CRT display to any standard LCD
display is really all you need to do. I find I don't use stereo a lot.
The nice crispness of the LCD displays is really good enough, and the
software is quick enough that one can do quick rotations and get a good
feel for dimensions.
I find students today don't really use stereo, and I've sort of gone
away from it. But I do like the Zalmans, as they do on occasion let me
use stereo if that is something I need to display
As far as computers for linux - I just build them. Buy a motherboard,
memory, hard drive, DVD drive, and some sort of video card and you are
good to go. Costs around $300-$400 or so per computer if you do it
right. I have boxes that are over 10 years old that will run a typical
cns job in 10 minutes. While that is slow compared to most things now,
I feel I need a 10 minute break after modeling an entire molecule (I
used to get a day break, how times have changed).
All modern flavors of linux are very user friendly when it comes to
installing (some more than others, that's a whole different matter; I
still use fedora). They don't mind hardware, and in fact they do well
with almost any newer hardware
Good luck
Dave
On 2/20/2013 2:58 PM, jlliu liu wrote:
Hi All,
I am about to order some linux boxes for protein crystallography use
from DELL. Could you guys share the experience which model would be
the best for this purpose?
Also I know the stereo monitor topic has been discussed previously,
but I would like to get the opinion for the current best stereo
monitor available for model building in protein crystallography.
Thanks so much in advance for sharing your experience.
Jinyu
