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Re: Equipment for Synoptic Met Labs (fwd)


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Robb Kambic                                Unidata Program Center
Software Engineer III                      Univ. Corp for Atmospheric Research
address@hidden             WWW: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 1999 15:31:01 +0000
From: Robert Mullenax <address@hidden>
To: Arnold M. Hori <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Equipment for Synoptic Met Labs

I would second what Don said about Solaris for Intel.  It is
free for education or non-commercial use.  We have been using
it since May 1998 and have been very happy.  It was my first
experience with Unix since experimenting with Linux
a few months before that.  I know that are a lot of ardent
Linux supporters in the Unidata community, but I kept
encountering irritating bugs with Linux, and I found Solaris
much more user friendly and as a new Unix user I found
the Sun AnswerBook documentation easier to use and more
helpful than gathering together all of the helpful,
but scattered Linux info(this would not really
apply to you I suppose).  I did encounter some problems
with the X-server on Solaris 2.6, but have had no trouble
at all with Solaris 7.

I ran the LDM and McIDAS side by side on two identical
166 Mhz Pentiums with EIDE drives for about 1 month,
with one running RedHat 5.2 and the other Solaris 7.
Disk access was faster with RedHat as it supports
Ultra DMA33 while Solaris does not, but I added more
RAM to the Solaris box (96MB for Solaris vs. 80MB for Linux)
and found that in every day use as a workstation that even
though Linux felt a little faster, it was not a tremendous
difference.  With SCSI disks Solaris speeds up considerably.

We have been running Solaris on one of our main machines
a 400Mhz PII with 256MB of RAM since May 1998 and have been
very happy with it.  It is even better now with a SCSI data
disk. It ingests and decodes the full NOAAPort running all
of the McIDAS and GEMPAK decoders, produces some web images,
and is our McIDAS and GEMPAK workstation.

Since you already have Sun experience I would certainly recommend
Solaris for Intel.  The only caveat is to check the Hardware
Compatibilty List, hardware support especially with video
cards is rather limited (unless you install XFree86).

Hope this helps,
Robert Mullenax