BlackBird Saga: 8. Desktop

So the Blackbird is installed and configured (at least partially). Thus I have re-organised my desk – I put my ODROID desktop to the storage and displaced the SGI O2.

The O2 is still my main computer but I wish to use the Blackbird for computationally intensive tasks. I also have to ad some hardware – there is no internal speaker so I must find suitable external ones. Also the Radeon WX4100 is still not installed. It is not necessary for browsing the web or for computations but 3D card will be essential for data visualizations.

In the future it may replace my O2 completely but at the moment I don’t think that it is possible. I first have to find some equivalent to tools that I have been using on my O2 (even for open source ones because some of them don’t compile on modern Linux systems).

I have been using the Fedora Linux. As a long-time Ubuntu/Debian user I am bit surprised by many things. I don’t say that it does not work (because it does very well – the “dnf” tool is easy to use for example) but I miss some software packages. So I have had to compile myself these things:

• remind (!)
• txt2pdbdoc
• palmpix
• SILO library
• xtitle

All of them even in the ubuntu. With some others I have had no luck, for example with the “x2x” which is essential for me. I also have to try the SPRNG library. And things like the csLaTeX work with issues (well, it says that it’s obsolete and it should not be used for new documents, but it also fails on my old documents).

So I still have to do a lot of things here…

Update: The x2x actually compiles without issues. The necessary dependencies are listed in the README.md file here. And SPRNG5 compiles well, too. But I will have to update my code to this version (I have been using the version 2).