New distro question

[Šarūnas]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Labitt, Bruce wrote:
> I realize this is / was / will be a religious argument, but I'm having
> trouble with this distribution of Centos on my computer.  I was
> wondering if there was a distro more up to date and was suited for
> scientific calculations.
> 
> I'm familiar with FC6, due to a myth install (thanks Jarod, Ben et al)
> so I would not mind installing FC8.  I'm not interested in FC9 only due
> to the fact that it hasn't been released yet, and I want something
> relatively stable.  I have downloaded FC8 and opensuse10.3.  Any others
> I should consider?

I'm helping a department of mathematicians here with 50% of them using
either Debian or Ubuntu (the other half uses OS X). Their experience and
computer-savvy'ness differs wildly, but most of them are quite happy
with their desktops. Some run stable versions, some prefer Debian
'unstable' or Ubuntu's release of the day, be it 'alpha' or 'beta'... In
case of Debian, unstable is quite stable actually and the software is
pretty much recent. Ubuntu takes the 'unstable' from the name, adds some
desktop conveniences and perhaps some stability.

As far as gnuplot install, Debian/Ubuntu package management brings in
all the dependencies, of course. 'apt-get install gnuplot'.

If you want, you can build packages from Deb/Ubuntu source using
standard Debian utilities *and* your custom compiler optimizations, for
example, 'apt-build install gnuplot'. apt-build is configurable to take
into account your custom settings and pass them to make/gcc.

Of course you can still always do 'configure && make && make install'
from whatever source you prefer.

'Scientific' is a wide area and you may have to check Debian/Ubuntu
repositories for software that you need. Commercial
Mathematica/Maple/Matlab also run well on both x86 and amd64
Debians/Ubuntus.

We are mostly Dell shop here, with some IBM and custom-built machines
thrown in. I still have to run into something that wasn't supported by
Ubuntu.

Kind regards,
Šarūnas Burdulis
Sysadmin, Mathematics at Dartmouth


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFH+795VVkpJ1MUn+YRAnasAJwJewseo+XP9UG0vV/4RlXeYYPS6QCfaacm
nBoq5DERW3xIEpq1WwYLyQ0=
=wNGO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----