20020520: WMU Meteorology Lab

>From:  Elen Cutrim <address@hidden>
>Organization:  Western Michigan
>Keywords:  200205202014.g4KKEFa17656 LAB workstation upgrade

Elen,

>I hope all is well with you in Boulder.  Here in Michigan we are still
>weaaring our Winter clothing:)!

The winter was extremely dry here.  Lots of cities along the front
range of Colorado are implementing water use restrictions.  One city,
Layfayette, is just about ready to limit lawn watering to one day a
week, and the total amount of water permissible to 0.5 inch!  Things
could be very bad if the summer is anywhere near as dry as last year.

>Please find attached the description of the current status of the
>Meteorology lab.

Sorry I didn't get to this yesterday.  I hope my comments are not too
late.

>It contains the summarized history and a request for
>upgrading the lab.  I would like you to take a look in the request part
>so that you could tell me if it is adequate to run McIDAS-X in at least
>one of the workstations and use the Integrated Data Viewer for my
>students.

Option 1 will work find for McIDAS.  Given that Option 2 seems to keep
the 18 Dells using Windows of some sort, more effort would have to be
expended to setup an environment in which McIDAS would work (for
example, loading in Cygwin; some sort of X Windows package; or
VMware).  The extra work would fall on the student system administrator
and would be outside of his/her normal Windows activities.  This may
work against the premise that there is more expertise for Windows
support than for Unix.

>The clientele of my Introduction to Meteorology and Climate
>is mostly formed of the aviation and secondary education majors. The
>class enrollment is 80 to 160/semester and each of the lab sessions hold
>20 students.

The hardware proposed in Option 2 could be used nicely to run either
McIDAS or MetApps/IDV.  The operating system that they are running
under, however, might be different.  The Java virtual machine support
under Windows 2000, for instance, is superior to that under Linux or
Solaris x86.  So, for IDV you would probably want to be running Windows
2000 (or, perhaps, XP).  McIDAS, on the other hand, runs best under
Unix (like Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris x86).  One can setup an
environment under Windows in which McIDAS could run, but, again, this
may place more system administration burdens on the student that she/he
is able to deal with.  Recently, I have heard of some success using
McIDAS in the VMware package (not free, but not expensive) under
Windows.  Since I have never tried this environment, I can say for sure
that things would work with no problems.  I do have extensive
experience in running McIDAS under any/all of Linux, FreeBSD, and
Solaris x86.  These environments work well, but the are Unix, so the
system administration load issue comes up.

>I am going to have a meeting with the Department chair tomorrow at noon.

Again, I am sorry that I couldn't get to this yesterday!

>Thanks for your input.

Please let me know if you have further questions on issues like running
Windows and Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris x86 in a dual boot mode on PC hardware.

Cheers,

Tom

>From address@hidden Tue May 21 12:41:17 2002
>Subject: Re: 20020520: WMU Meteorology Lab

Thanks, Tom.  

We just finished the meeting, but I will have further 
discussions the on the lab upgrading.
I will get in touch with you if I need additional information and help
installing the software packages.

I whish you wet Spring and Summer seasons.

Thanks again,

Elen

Elen Cutrim
Associate Professor
Geography Department
Western Michigan University
Ph: (616)387-3418
FAX:(616)387-3442
email: address@hidden