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?
>
> Thanks.
>
>                     - Mike
Hi Mike,

I'm running a mix of mostly Ubuntu and Scientific 4.4 right now..  I'm 
using Ubuntu mostly as desktops, where application availability is the 
most important piece, bleeding edge browser and all that mess.  SL is 
running on my compute servers and anything that requires binary 
compatibility with some of the binary tools we have to run here 
(Cadence, Gaussian..).  My servers are Solaris 10/Sparc for NFS or file 
IO bound boxes, and Ubuntu for meta data servers, mostly because of the 
update frequency and availibility of tools like cacti, nagios, bacula.. 
(which may well be in SL as well, I have not checked)

Paul