SuSE 10.1 workstation image

We need a new workstation image as SuSE 9.3 won't be supported for very much longer (ends Easter 2007). In order that I don't have to do this this again in six months I'm going for SuSE 10.1 rather than 10.0. I have considered Debian but am still not totally convinced about the improvement in the release cycle. Ubuntu needs too much messing about to make it work the way I want it to. Redhat isn't free (as in beer).

Going to SuSE 10.1 is going to involve changes and compromise as usual.

Packages to be dropped

Unless of course someone comes up with a good reason not to

• molmol - Does anyone use this? It's old code and so a lot of work to maintain
• GAMESS-US - I'll keep the source hanging about, but does anyone need the compiled version?
• GAMESS-UK - ditto
• Pathscale - nothing can make me install this, it's not currently supported on 10.1 by the vendor. I expect this will change in time though, at which point I'll install it
• g95 - still not at release 1.0 and therefore probably a moving target. So painless to install that anyone who wants to use it can easily do it themselves
• Mathematica 5.1 - We have 5.2 so no need for 5.1?
• PGI 6.0 and below - In fact only 6.2 is supported on SuSE 10.1, but 6.1 seems to work OK so far
• Intel ifort 8.x
• Intel icc 8.x

Packages I am definitely installing

There's a list of these as I do them at http://www-theor.ch.cam.ac.uk/IT/workstations/suse-10.1/software.html , with links to their documentation.

• Acrobat Reader 7 (PDF viewer) DONE
• Firefox (web browser) DONE
• Epiphany (web browser) DONE
• GNOME desktop DONE
• gfortran (free Fortran 95 compiler) DONE
• gnuplot
• gv (Postscript viewer) DONE
• k3b (CD/DVD burning) DONE
• Numeric Python (maths modules for Python) DONE
• OpenOffice.org (Office suite) DONE
• OpenSSH (SSH client) DONE
• Pan (news client) DONE
• Pine (mail/news client) DONE
• rasmol (molecular visualisation) DONE
• TeX/LaTeX (document preparation system) DONE
• Thunderbird (mail/news client) DONE
• xmgrace (graphing package) DONE
• xpdf (PDF viewer) DONE
• xv (image viewer) DONE
• Intel MKL 7.2.1 DONE
• Gary Strangman's Python utilities
• Mathematica 5.2 DONE
• NAG Fortran (f95) 5.1
• numarray DONE
• PGI Server (Fortran and C compilers) 6.2 DONE
• pymol DONE
• rdesktop DONE
• Scientific Python DONE
• VMD DONE
• xmakemol DONE
• xwrits DONE
• xxdiff DONE
• Xemacs
• The GIMP DONE
• Inkscape DONE

Good things about the 10.1 image

• security updates until May 2008, possibly longer
• working automounter
• much better removable media handling (in fact this is debatable: it only works for GNOME and KDE but it works better for those than the old one did)
• gcc 4 and gfortran part of image
• preconfigured lookup support in mail clients (ie a University-wide email addressbook)
• module system handles libraries intelligently: no more -L and -I needed in most cases, but full control available if needed
• intending to have a 64 bit version as well as 32
• modules dependencies far more logical

Problems with 10.1 image

• no gcc3 package, so some stuff won't currently compile. They supply g77 out of gcc 3 so why not gcc itself?
• Pathscale don't support it yet
• removable media handling broken for fvwm users

Proposed new packages

You can add things here

• R (Could be installed from source)
• Octave
• ATLAS (The ACML libraries included with the PGI compilers are not quite the same as ATLAS - I've had problems with ACML that have vanished with ATLAS was used. Mainly memory leaks.)
• Imagemagick