Hi,

Frankly, any vendor or assembler of PC's will do. Things to make sure to 
have on your PC: an NVIDIA graphics board in order to get nice graphics 
(their Linux drivers are fine; I don't know their current range of 
boards, here we buy middle-range boards, not the cheapest ones that are 
specific for cheap PC's and gaming in mind - so you'll need to check 
this out on their web site). It also helps to have one or two Firewire 
ports in case.

Our employer decides which brand of computers we must buy, until fairly 
recently it was DELL (I have one of those), now it's LENOVO (formerly 
IBM) and several colleagues have some of these and they are fine too. A 
long time ago I had a workstation that had been put together by a local 
shop from parts and that was fine too.

The choice is mainly whether or not you want a laptop or desktop. With a 
laptop, you can have a second (large) monitor sitting on your desk, but 
take the PC with you in the evening so that you can work at home if the 
family allows you to (with a desktop and a suitable graphics board, you 
can also have 2 monitors on your desk, this is what they have on the 
beamlines at the ESRF).

Linux flavour: I personally do not like Ubuntu very much because it 
seems you cannot have a root account, so that all admin has to be done 
using sudo commands. Over here, the team in charge of computers and 
networks decides for us which flavour of Linux has to be installed on 
our machines. Until recently, we had Fedora Core (I think that with 
"Secure Linux" that installed automatically these were very secure 
computers for them because at first, everything was forbidden as a 
security risk - like printing is not allowed; or accessing the internet 
is not allowed etc; I have Fedora Core 8 which was fine as soon as the 
Secure Linux protection was removed). 1 year ago, it was Scientific 
Linux that had to be installed, the reason being that the updates are 
not as frequent as those on Fedora Core (and also, the distro is 
targetted towards scientific applications). The ESRF has SUSE Linux on 
their computers, and they work fine.

Fred.

Benini Stefano (P) wrote:
>
> Dear All,
>
>  
>
> I need to buy a Linux workstation to run crystallographic software and 
> graphics like ccp4, mosflm, coot., etc.,
>
> Could you please suggest me a good combination of hardware and  which 
> linux operating system to install (ubuntu?)? I can spend about 1500€
>
> Technology evolves so fast that I really want to be up to date not to 
> be already late!
>
>  
>
> Thank you very much in advance
>
>  
>
> Stefano
>
>  
>
>  
>
> Stefano Benini, Ph.D.
>
> Assistant Professor
>
>  
>
> _http://pro.unibz.it/staff2/sbenini/_
>
>  
>
> ****************************
>
> Bio-organic Chemistry Laboratory
>
> Faculty of Science and Technology
>
> Free University of Bolzano
>
> Piazza Università, 5
>
> 39100 Bolzano, Italy
>
> Office (room K2.11):  +39 0471 017128
>
> Laboratory (room E.012): +39 0471 017901
>
> Fax: +39 0471 017009
>
> ***************************
>
>  
>