Hi all,
If one installs Freesurfer on Ubuntu, should he/she prefer the desktop version of Ubuntu or server edition? Does it matter?
Thank you,
Burcu Aysen Urgen.
Burcu Ays,en Ürgen wrote:
Hi all,
If one installs Freesurfer on Ubuntu, should he/she prefer the desktop version of Ubuntu or server edition? Does it matter?
From FreeSurfer's perspective, it doesn't matter all that much if at all -- depends more on what other tasks you want the machine to do. The Ubuntu kernel shipped with the 'server' edition is optimized towards a different set of constraints than the 'desktop' edition (server: better support for virtualization, 64GB memory addressing for 32-bit systems, etc; desktop: pre-empting turned on for quicker desktop response, 32-bit version can only address 4GB of memory, lots of user-space apps like openoffice, firefox, etc.).
Other than that, each offers different set of base installed apps. The "server" edition comes out-of-the-box with a lot more "servers" than the "desktop" edition. In fact, the server edition doesn't even install X11 by default.
Of course, nothing prevents you from installing all the server apps in the desktop edition, or adding all the desktop tools in the server edition post-install -- at which point other than different kernel optimizations there's little difference.
Personally, I'd install the desktop version and add whatever additional servers I might need afterwards -- you'll be up and running FS a lot quicker.
Yes, everything Rudolph said. Also, the FreeSurfer we package for Ubuntu is actually a CentOS build because Ubuntu is a flavor of linux like CentOS and since FreeSurfer package is self-contained everything should work once you un-tar-gz.
The only things we don't bundle are X server and OpenGL which are a must have for a functioning FreeSurfer system. So you should choose whichever Ubuntu offers X and OpenGL.
On Sep 9, 2009, at 11:17 PM, Rudolph Pienaar wrote:
Burcu Ays,en Ürgen wrote:
Hi all,
If one installs Freesurfer on Ubuntu, should he/she prefer the desktop version of Ubuntu or server edition? Does it matter?
From FreeSurfer's perspective, it doesn't matter all that much if at all -- depends more on what other tasks you want the machine to do. The Ubuntu kernel shipped with the 'server' edition is optimized towards a different set of constraints than the 'desktop' edition (server: better support for virtualization, 64GB memory addressing for 32-bit systems, etc; desktop: pre-empting turned on for quicker desktop response, 32- bit version can only address 4GB of memory, lots of user-space apps like openoffice, firefox, etc.).
Other than that, each offers different set of base installed apps. The "server" edition comes out-of-the-box with a lot more "servers" than the "desktop" edition. In fact, the server edition doesn't even install X11 by default.
Of course, nothing prevents you from installing all the server apps in the desktop edition, or adding all the desktop tools in the server edition post-install -- at which point other than different kernel optimizations there's little difference.
Personally, I'd install the desktop version and add whatever additional servers I might need afterwards -- you'll be up and running FS a lot quicker.
-- Rudolph Pienaar, M.Eng, D.Eng / email: rudolph@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging 149 (2301) 13th Street, Charlestown, MA 02129 USA
Freesurfer mailing list Freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu https://mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/freesurfer
freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
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Burcu Ayşen Ürgen -
Krish Subramaniam -
Rudolph Pienaar