Adk44: Created page with "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 goin..."

2019-05-13T12:50:53Z

Created page with "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 goin..."

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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
* 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
* ATLAS (maths library) DONE
* catdcd DONE
* DALTON DONE
* Firefox (web browser) DONE
* Epiphany (web browser) DONE
* GNOME desktop DONE
* gfortran (free Fortran 95 compiler) DONE
* 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 DONE
* Mathematica 5.2 DONE
* NAG Fortran (f95) 5.1 DONE
* 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
* The GIMP DONE
* Inkscape DONE
* g95 DONE
* gnuplot
* Imagemagick
* Intel compilers
* Intel debuggers
* Octave
* Xemacs

== 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 and I'll transfer them to the other list as I decide how I'm going to implement them.

* R (Could be installed from source)
* ipython (please?)
* enthought (python package) looks really nice.

SuSE 10.1 workstation image - Revision history

Adk44: Created page with "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 goin..."