[3dem] mac pro

Ben Eisenbraun bene at crystal.harvard.edu
Wed Jan 7 08:29:02 PST 2009


On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 10:26:34AM -0500, Fred Sigworth wrote:
> On Jan 6, 2009, at 8:53 PM, Sheemei wrote:
> >	I am thinking of getting a apple Mac pro desktop computer. I was  
> > wondering if all programs for single particle reconstruction works  
> > on it and also is installation a problem?
> 
> Chimera, EMAN and Imagic all run natively on the Mac OS.  I didn't  
> realize it, but Spider is too.

Our experience with SPIDER on OS X has been suboptimal, i.e. the same
script with the same input data will produce normal output on the linux
version of SPIDER and will either crash or produce bad/no data on the OS X
version.  Hopefully the new release will address some of these issues.

> As far as I know, Xmipp and Frealign are not supported directly on the
> Mac, but you can always run them under Linux on the machine.

The command line utilities in Xmipp should work okay under OS X.  I haven't
been able to get the graphical stuff to build as QT under OS X is still 
a bit rough around the edges.

Frealign builds and runs fine under OS X.

Fred's suggestion on using Parallels for linux-only applications is a good
one.  I've used both Parallels and VMware Fusion under OS X and they both 
work well.  I personally lean towards VMware.

As a general note, installation for any of the scientific software used in
EM, NMR or xray crystallography tends to be fairly similar between linux
and OS X.  In a few cases you can get a drag-and-drop style OS X
application, but that is still relatively uncommon.  You still primarily
get tarballs and zip files and some level of manual configuration.  

It's mostly fairly straightforward... except when it isn't.  :-)

-ben

--
Ben Eisenbraun
Structural Biology Grid                           Harvard Medical School
http://sbgrid.org                                 http://hms.harvard.edu


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