Tim,
it's a bit unfair to compare a MacBook with a ThinkPad. Obviously they
don't play in the same league. The MacBood rivals the Vaio for
flashiest lifestyle machine whereas the ThinkPad is a serious worker.
All three of them do crystallography just fine.
Andreas
Tim Gruene wrote:
> Hi,
>
> you should be able to run the programs you mention on any of the
> mainstream Linux distributions, especially when you are not scared
> installing some extra bits and pieces. One of the main nuisances I met
> recently is the requirement of libg2c for Fortran programs compiled with
> g77 and dynamically linked - on opensuse 11.x, libg2c was hard to find
> - but one could use the rpm from 10.3 and things were fine.
>
> One reason I don't like apple is my lousy experience with hardware
> maintenance. One I had an iBook G3. It took me to days, 50 screws to
> undo (this is not an exaggeration) and 3-4 screw drivers I had never
> heard of before only to replace the hard drive. Also the g++ compiler
> was twice as slow under MacOSX than under Debian which I installed in
> parallel on the same machine - 20min compile program (Xtools g++) vs. 10
> min (Debian g++) for some program.
>
> It must have been a Freudian slip when I hit the laptop off a table so I
> had reason to purchase an IBM thinkpad. On the thinkpad, hardware
> maintenance is about the opposite of my experience with the iBook: every
> screw on the outside is clearly labelled with numbers and even
> pictograms so you know which one to undo when you want to replace Memory
> or the hard drive or the keyboard - and they are only a few of them to
> achieve your goal.
>
> Tim
>
>
> --
> Tim Gruene
> Institut fuer anorganische Chemie
> Tammannstr. 4
> D-37077 Goettingen
>
> GPG Key ID = A46BEE1A
>
>
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Stephen Weeks wrote:
>
>> Dear BBers,
>> I would like to treat myself to a new laptop which will be my
>> primary use machine (i.e I want to run all the usual crystallography
>> packages, hopefully write a few papers, watch Lost online and pay the
>> bills when needs be). Although I am an ardent Apple fan I find it
>> difficult to justify forking out $2000 plus for a MacBook Pro so as an
>> alternative I've been looking into buying a machine running Linux.
>> During my comparison shopping studies I came across the small company
>> System76 (http://system76.com) that sell reasonably priced machines
>> that come with Ubuntu 8.1 (Intrepid Ibex) preinstalled. My two
>> questions are (i) Does anybody have any experience with machines from
>> this company ? (ii) Other than the Bltwish and 64bit issues can I
>> (compile) install and run CCP4, Arp/Warp, XDS Mosflm, Coot and Pymol
>> on this version of Ubuntu ? I don't mind tinkering around a bit to get
>> things to work as that's part of the fun.
>>
>>
>> Cheers Stephen
>>
>>
>> --
>> Stephen Weeks, Ph. D.
>> Drexel University College of Medicine
>> Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
>> Room 10102 New College Building
>> 245 N. 15th St.
>> Philadelphia, PA 19102
>>
>> Phone: (+) 215-762-7316
>> Fax: (+) 215-762-4452
>>
>
--
Andreas Förster, Research Associate
Paul Freemont & Xiaodong Zhang Labs
Department of Biochemistry, Imperial College London
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