I am considering purchasing a cheap second-hand laptop to install linux on,
and also GRASS.
I want to be able to run GRASS on the laptop.
I do not intend to do heavy processing. I only want to demonstrate
GRASS, show of the various features and prove that it works.
What minimum hardware specifications are recommended for GRASS?
Regards,
nick
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I am considering purchasing a cheap second-hand laptop to install linux on,
and also GRASS.
I want to be able to run GRASS on the laptop.
I do not intend to do heavy processing. I only want to demonstrate
GRASS, show of the various features and prove that it works.
What minimum hardware specifications are recommended for GRASS?
Regards,
nick
I don't know if there are any minimum specs out there but GRASS runs on
my Pentium Celeron 2.0 with 512 RAM, integrated video card laptop(64mb
shared memory) from 5 years ago. Not zippy and I really didn't use the
GUI much, so I would say try for something better than those specs.
QGIS works well enough to load small shapefiles, import gps and load
grass layers, just takes a minute or two on a 50,000 point layer.
PS: It's running Ubuntu 8.04 with XFCE as the window manager
You might want to use the requirements of Xubuntu as a good way to find
your minimum.
On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 09:24 +1000,
nicholas.g.lawrence@mainroads.qld.gov.au wrote:
I am considering purchasing a cheap second-hand laptop to install linux on,
and also GRASS.
I want to be able to run GRASS on the laptop.
I do not intend to do heavy processing. I only want to demonstrate
GRASS, show of the various features and prove that it works.
What minimum hardware specifications are recommended for GRASS?
Regards,
nick
Hi Nick!
Any laptop that "just runs linux" will run GRASS. And because any laptop
"can" (theoretically) run linux without problems, you should rather look
for *which* distro and its minimum requirements.
*Practically* speaking, I would look for tested-linux laptops [1] to
avoid nightmare's with drivers for the graphics! (a) ATI drivers don't
perform well currently even if ATI "opened" the specs -- they will
become good in the future. (b) NVidia drivers are binary-only
(closed-source) but it's true that they perform good.
Of course the more RAM and VideoRAM the better (in general). Another
important issue is I think the monitor. The bigger the better.
Especially if you are going to use it for demonstrations. If you can get
a 17" it would be great. If not a 15.4" should be also ok. The 14" or
less are not not enough for any kind of demonstrating anything on more
than 2-3 people (I have one 14").
I am considering purchasing a cheap second-hand laptop to
install linux on, and also GRASS.
I want to be able to run GRASS on the laptop.
I do not intend to do heavy processing. I only want to demonstrate
GRASS, show of the various features and prove that it works.
What minimum hardware specifications are recommended for
GRASS?
If I may take a stab at it:
Pentium-1 75MHz, 128mb RAM, 800x600 SVGA screen, 4gig hard drive.
(no kidding, that used to be my old home PC from spare parts. wrote
r.univar, r.in|out.mat, and r.in.xyz on that)
i.e. it'll pretty much run on anything, but if you want to work with large
datasets you'll want more power. The core GIS + raster map libraries were
written with the power of an IBM XT in mind... a nice side effect of that
frugality is that it scales rather well. From a design point of view it
is great to develop on crappy old hardware, the bottle necks are much more
apparent and you have motivation to fix them. field test your new
electronics with the batteries half dead, as that's when the problems will
show up...
Of course remember that the user experience on a slow PC will be slow,
and the user may/will blame that on GRASS instead of the old laptop..
If going with a really low RAM/CPU laptop, I'd spend some time looking
into dumping Gnome/KDE eye candy WMs and using Fluxbox or XFCE ...
Linux runs great on old hardware if you take the time to replace the RAM/
CPU hungry user apps. Especially hardware drivers become more perfect the
older the hardware gets. (see also sylpheed/mutt/pine, qiv, rexima/mpg123/
cdcd, top "M", galeon/dillo, xpdf, gv, ...)