workstation_setup

SBGrid workstation configuration

  • There are significant benefits to installing software on a network filesystem, if available. NFS, SMB or AFP are all options for sharing a single software installation among multiple machines. Network installations have less administrative overhead, bandwidth and significant disk savings over a local installation.

Local installations are an option using our Installation Manager. Command line and GUI options are available. These can be configured with automatic updates.

Linux

  • libGLU is required for many structure visualization programs ( COOT, PyMOL, IMOD, Chimera, etc). This library is usually provided with the graphics card drivers, or in the absence of that using the linux mesa package. For the standard CentOS repositories, running yum install mesa-libGLU (and potentially yum install mesa-libGLU-devel) as should provide non-hardware accelerated versions of these libraries.

  • All Linux machines need installations of a recent version (6.17+) of csh/tcsh. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and other recent distributions usually have an up to date version.

  • 64-bit machines need a number of 32-bit compatibility packages due to a number of legacy packages that are only available as 32-bit applications. Additional fonts for Tcl/Tk, Motif and Xview applications are also encouraged.

Packages for RHEL 7, 8, and 9 and compatible machines

32-bit compatibility libraries and fonts

yum install glibc.i686 libgcc.i686 libX11.i686 libXaw.i686 libXext.i686  \
 ncurses.i686 redhat-lsb.i686 xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-75dpi \
 xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-misc freetype.i686 \
 fontconfig.i686 zlib.i686 libstdc++.i686

X11 libraries and other required packages

yum install libxcb xcb-util xcb-util-image xcb-util-keysyms xcb-util-renderutil xcb-util-wm

yum install gnome-terminal libXScrnSaver glx-utils

In addition to the above, on RHEL8, CentOS8 and similar distributions, you will need

yum install libnsl
  • gnome-terminal is required for hkl2map.

  • The same 32-bit requirement applies for 64-bit Debian and Ubuntu machines. This is supported via the Multiarch system. You'll need at least the following packages to run most of the software. Please email us if you discover we have left some out. apt-get install libc6-i386 lsb tcsh gawk libjpeg62 curl libx11-6:i386 libxext6:i386

Information on configuring 3D stereo can be found here

MacOS

  • XQuartz is required to provide X11 support on macOS. The latest Xquartz version can be downloaded from the MacOSForge site here: https://www.xquartz.org .