[SciPy-User] Ubuntu vs Fedora for scientific work?

[alexander baker]

Some very interesting points from David, especially the virtual machine
point.

Having a large number of historic scripts, sensitive to library versions,
upgrading major libraries has to be a careful but necessary process,
especially to take advantage of some of the new features like the time
series objects from scikits.

To minimise the impact, vmware on Ubuntu offers an easy way to create any
flavour/type OS. I keep a replica of the parent machine and test upgrades on
the virtual machine ahead of any upgrades to the parent libraries, ironing
out any wrinkles first. Ubuntu and vmware is almost painless, this is a big
plus for me.

Alex Baker

Mobile: 07788 872118
Blog: www.alexfb.com

--
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.


2009/8/4 David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>

> Hi Dharhas,
>
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 5:24 AM, Dharhas
> Pothina<Dharhas.Pothina at twdb.state.tx.us> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > This is slightly off topic but I felt that this lists membership would
> have good input on this question. I am presently running fedora 8 on my main
> workstation and it is getting a bit long in the tooth. Back when I set this
> machine up, RHEL was too much of a pain to use because scientific packages
> were always extremely outdated and difficult to install. Ubuntu was nice to
> use at home but installing scientific packages like the Intel Fortran
> compiler etc was complicated (not impossible, just more work than I wanted).
> So I went with Fedora which has worked pretty well so far.
>
> Distribution choices are kind of religious choices, almost like vim
> vs. Emacs kind of things. In my opinion:
>  - Knowing one well matters much more than which one you choose.
>  - If you work with other people, particularly people more
> knowledgable than you, choosing the same platform as them is better,
> everything else being equal.
>
> Installing the intel compiler is not so difficult anymore on Ubuntu -
> Ubuntu being popular as it is now, I think most projects will support
> Ubuntu (at least the LTS version) as a second platform after RHEL.
>
> Also, the current availability of virtual machines means that as long
> as you have enough memory, having several OS at the same time is much
> easier than it used to be,
>
> cheers,
>
> David
> _______________________________________________
> SciPy-User mailing list
> SciPy-User at scipy.org
> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-user
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-user/attachments/20090804/9dad48ed/attachment.html>