On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, Michael Hannon wrote:

> Hi, folks.  I'm getting some inquiries about Ubuntu these days.  The 
> following, from one of our postdocs, is fairly typical:
>
>>  I'm not usually one to proselytize, but the availability of scientific
>>  applications on "Scientific Linux" is just embarrassing compared to
>>  Debian/Ubuntu.  Just some of the scientific apps I can apt-get that
>>  aren't available on SL: axiom, singular, root, grace.
>
> I am personally happy and comfortable with SL, but I *can* see an advantage 
> to having Avogadro's number of packages available for quick and easy 
> installation.
>
> I'd like to know how others are dealing with this.  Is anybody using Ubuntu 
> clients with SL servers for instance?  Any other words of wisdom on this 
> topic?

We currently build a few packages which users have mentioned arn't present 
(or where we know that people will complain if they go missing).

Some of these are locally tweaked for various reasons e.g. we have 
grace-5.1.21, built to link against our local build of fftw2 while others 
are just basically rebuilds from FC etc srpms (e.g. gsl, octave).

   http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/linux/sl/damtp/5x/

Sometimes it appears we built packages for no good reason, e.g. they are 
in DAG or the SL base.  In those cases the packages either have some 
terrible hack/change to configs or I didn't notice that such a package 
already existed...

Some of these may depend on packages from other repos (e.g. DAG), but to 
avoid accidentally picking up packages we didn't intend we keep another 
local repo of our packages plus updates and 3rd party packages we need 
(and have tested). Of course that makes tracking updates/bug-fixes a 
little harder -- we are still working out some of the kinks...

I should add that we currently only have SL50 machines ON TEST for users, 
though the roll-out to the ~300 desktop-linux boxes is due to start this 
week (well we told the users the 16th but...)

  -- Jon