I've installed Julia on both windows and ubuntu servers on Azure. Ubuntu and RHEL/Fedora have good support for Julia only because Elliot and Milan have put in significant effort in supporting them. ie, the reason for shortlisting these OSs is that people have done the work, rather than any technical shortcomings in either Julia or the OS. The Generic linux binaries work reasonably well on other modern OSs, but if you, have issues on an esoteric distribution, you are less likely to get answers on this list.
On windows, there is some pain to be had, but it is surmountable if you are an experienced windows sysadmin. There is a large amount of pain in building Julia on windows, but if you are only downloading and running the binary install for 0.3, all that pain has been absorbed by Jameson/Tony/Elliot et al. Some Julia package also have native dependencies. Most have good windows support, but you may want to check for the packages you may want to use. ZMQ in particular is well supported on windows. So in summary, use windows if you are experienced running Windows servers in production. Otherwise, use ubuntu. Regards - Avik On Tuesday, 14 July 2015 10:07:16 UTC+1, Eric Forgy wrote: > > I am about to do some experiments running Julia from an Azure VM. The > first decision to make is "Which VM?" Azure has a "Quick Create" option for > creating VM's and the options are: > > - Windows Server > - Ubuntu Server > - OpenLogic > - Oracle Linux > - CoreOS > - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server > > I presume Azure has a good reason to shortlist these VM's (and shortlist > them in that order) so unless there is a good reason to deviate, I'll > probably choose one of the above. > > If I look at the Julia downloads <http://julialang.org/downloads/> page, > I see the following selections: > > - Windows > - Mac OS X > - Ubuntu > - Fedora/RHEL/CentOS/SL > - Generic Linux > > I presume you guys have a good reason to shortlist these OSs (but not sure > if the order is significant). I am agnostic about which OS to use, but I > prefer to use one that has the best Julia support and will cause the least > headaches, which presumably might be related to the OS most Julia > developers are using. > > If I could, I would probably prefer to run Julia on a Windows VM, but I > get the impression Windows has the fewest Julia developers working on it > (see Stephen's comment here > <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/julia-users/zgoqVYyPaIk/lfRmeROpI7YJ>) > so I predict there to be some pain points. Is that impression misguided? > Any thoughts? > > If not Windows, comparing the above two lists, I'd be inclined to consider > using Ubuntu. > > My use case is ultimately going to be distributed computing in the cloud > (Azure) driven by a web app (ASP.NET MVC) with communication via REST > and/or ZMQ. > > In a nutshell: > > 1. I have a slight preference for a Windows VM, but could be dissuaded > if there is some pain to be expected. Is there? > 2. If not Windows, it seems Ubuntu VM is the next likely candidate > with apparently solid support in the Julia community. Is that true? > 3. Any other recommendation better than the above two? > > Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks! >
