20030512: McIDAS under LINUX

>From:  "=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Marianne=20K=F6nig?=" <address@hidden>
>Organization:  EUMETSAT
>Keywords:  200305121146.h4CBkd7U008640 McIDAS-X Linux

Hi Marianne,

>just a quick question:
>
>On what Linux systems should mcidas run? (that is, without any problems, haha).
>The MUG home page claims RedHat 7.2, is that the only one?

Internally, we run on RedHat 7.1, 7.3, and 8.0.  We were running on 6.2
up until a few months ago, but Redhat is no longer providing bugfixes
for something that old.

Sites in my community are running under Slackware, Debian, Connectiva
(the Universidad Federal do Para in Belem, Brazil), SuSE, and
Mandrake.  Each system is slightly different, so one does sometimes
have to tweak a script to get it to work correctly, but the frequency
of having to do that has been decreasing.  The biggest change from one
system to the next is the use of xinetd versus inetd.  RedHat has moved
to using xinetd, and this has required substantial changes in
mcinet.sh.  Debian, for one, continues to use inetd, and SuSE or
Slackware (I can't remember which right now) allows one to use either.
It is because of these small differences that SSEC does not
"officially" support McIDAS on any Linux distribution it does not run
iun-house.

As far as performance goes, I would recommend FreeBSD.  The OS and
applications that we offer run noticably faster under FreeBSD than
Linux on the same hardware.  The difference is real!

>Thank you,

No worries.

>PS: Hope you are well  :)

I am doing pretty well. I hope things are going well for you also.

I finally took a mini-vacation (my first real vacation in over 5 years)
to rest up in preparation for the new McIDAS release that will be
coming out any day now.  This is a bigger obstacle for me since I
have to roll all of my additions into the SSEC release, create new
web pages, and then release it to my community as soon as possible.
For years, I have been targeting my release for the beginning of
August, but I have been told by a couple of sites that I need to push
this up to early July.  It looks like I won't have any time off
(and I mean 7 days a week) as soon as SSEC releases v2003 (sigh).

Tom
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