Re: [PyMOL] best linux distribution to run pymol

I accidentaly sent my reply to your private address first -- sorry.
Resending to the list.

2007/7/13, Joris Beld <be...@or...>:
> We have two molecular modeling PCs with 3D emitters (and CRT monitors).
> One runs the linux distribution Redhat (Gnome) and the other one Suse
> (KDE). It seems to us that the one running Suse/KDE is much faster than
> the one running Redhat/Gnome. Faster in the sense of rotating big
> surface rendered hexamers, 60mers. These are equivalent machines with
> one year old Athlon64, 4GB RAM and Nvidia Fx1400 graphic cards.
> (unfortunately i cannot switch to Suse since i cannot get
> Insight/Discovery Studio to run under Suse).

Try to check if both machines have the same drivers for NVidia video cards
(paste output of `glxinfo' command at terminal if you are unable to
figure it out).
NVidia company's drivers that give best performance and utilize 3D acceleration
are closed-source, so distributions which have religious approach to Free
Software tend not to include it and use less efficient free/open source drivers
(as in vanilla Debian, or as I would expect from Red Hat -- at least from freely
available Red Hat that I remember, and from currently available Fedora, I'm not
sure about Red Hat Enterprise).  Distributions that are focused more on user
experience than on ideology (such as Ubuntu or as I would expect from SuSE)
include rather closed-source NVidia's drivers.

If your RH box uses open-source drivers, try to download drivers from nvidia.com
and install them manually.  Their installation script is automated and usually
works right out of the box.

Also, please send distribution versions so that I can comment on it -- Red Hat
Enterprise, as far as I know, tends to use old versions of packages since they
are tested and stable.

I personally use PyMOL (not that I use it much) on PLD Linux Distribution
(http://www.pld-linux.org/) which I also co-develop, but this is a very specific
distribution tailored for power users and experienced administrators.  There is
repared .spec file for PyMOL in distro's CVS repository so that users
can compile
open-source line of PyMOL in automated way and install results in their system
as an RPM package, which makes managing system much easier.

Regards,
Maciek

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