Workstation OS

[the graduate]

Ok,

Z800, dual processor Intel 5660 Xeons, 1.2TB SAS drive (RAID 1) (2TB SATA drive - redundancy), 24GB RAM, Quadro 4000 or V8800 FirePro (not sure)....

I use openSuSE 11.1 atm...

Windows 7, openSuSE or RHEL...?..I'm not sure.....most propriety software we have is for WinOS, but the workstation I'll be using to develop code (Fortran) for the re-processing of tera-bytes of data...

Dual boot - been there, done that....no...

 

[oldhat]

Some nice hardware there!!

Why are you looking for an alternative OS, is openSuSe not meeting your requirements?

BTW, what IDE do you use for Fortran?

 

[bullzeye.za]

Depending on your level of expertise; I'd say Ubuntu, then Debian ( as they are the largest distributions of Linux, therefore there is a huge support base )

Windows 7 has shed a lot of the clunkyness that previous windows versions came with, and you can always throw up a VM if you -need- something in unix.

Personally, I'm busy getting my head around OSX Lion, but I'm not sure if that's an option in your case.

 

[the graduate]

Some nice hardware there!!

Why are you looking for an alternative OS, is openSuSe not meeting your requirements?

BTW, what IDE do you use for Fortran?

gedit and VIM when ssh'ing.....can't get Kate to run on Gnome.....don't know why....

Naw, openSuSE meets my requirments just fine...we discussed it and the geophysical software we use is mostly written for Windows...however, I won't be using it much as such, unless I have to look at the reprocessed data....VMWare will be the best solution with WinOS as host, but we have older Dell precision workstations to which I can port the re-processed data and view....I requested openSuSE with the Z800, but I'm having a re-think...

 

[the graduate]

Depending on your level of expertise; I'd say Ubuntu, then Debian ( as they are the largest distributions of Linux, therefore there is a huge support base )

Windows 7 has shed a lot of the clunkyness that previous windows versions came with, and you can always throw up a VM if you -need- something in unix.

Personally, I'm busy getting my head around OSX Lion, but I'm not sure if that's an option in your case.

As mentioned, the software is a problem, and the supplier mentioned that adding more DIMMS or HDD for instance will incur a cost with the Apple.....and I think I'm limited to ATi....

with a HP, I can add DIMMS and HDD to my heart's content, should I need to manually add more...

I know my way well around openSuSE and have worked little bit on Ubuntu, but its like driving a left-hand drive car to me, to be honest....

 

[ponder]

Why not stick with opensuse and run win7 in a VM for when you need it.?

 

[garyc]

For software development you can try Scientific Linux. This has the advantage of being Red Hat based so it is stable. The initial installation also gives the option for setting the PC up as a software development workstation, so you get things like Emacs, Eclipse, OpenJDK and VMM right from the beginning.

With getting Kate running under Gnome - I have it running with Ubuntu 10.04. Maybe it is just an issue with the SUSE implementation.