[YLUG] Summer socials, other planning

[Roger Leigh]

Richard Birnie <rbirnie at totalise.co.uk> writes:

> In the biology department very little at undergraduate level unless
> it's changed since I did my degree. Nick (either of them) or Roger
> would have better idea.

I think this is still true, from what I've seen over the last year.
It's a shame really; I found GNU/Linux of immense use as a Biology
undergrad back in '99-02, and stuff like R, LaTeX, XFig, OOo are
ideal.  I mostly used eXceed X sessions to tower then, and it looks
like it's just the same now.

> The main computer labs are all XP and most of the research groups
> have Windows or OS X desktops. There are some fedora machines but I
> think they're more used by the research groups. In fact I think the
> person who administers them is on this list. Not sure what the
> bioinformatics masters people get exposed to.

All the machines for use by Master's students are dual boot Fedora
Core and Windows 2000, so thankfully postgrads can use Linux with much
less hassle.  From observing what people use, I'd say useage was about
50% of each.  But, much of the "fun" bioinformatics software is
written for UNIX/GNU.  Quite a few people used OpenOffice, and I made
some use of LaTeX (but was foiled by my heavy use of TeXLIVE bits and
my custom $HOME/texmf tree which was not compatible with Fedora's
TeX).  As a general platform for Mail/Web browsing, it had a good
following.

There are also GNU/Linux machines dedicated for heavier computation,
which I've used when having a look at searching genome databases with
Hidden Markov Models I created from sequence alignments, and R number
crunching.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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