[Radiance-general] OS Compariton (WAS:Re: rad -n and -N parameters / switches)

[Randolph M. Fritz]

It might be possible to get full Radiance going under Windows 7 
Ultimate, which has a Unix emulation environment.  However, doing this 
requires development time and the purchase of a copy of Ultimate and 
possibly a copy of the MS Visual Studio suite as well.  To run the 
resulting package might also require users to buy Ultimate.

So...one more thing we might try, if we had the resources and if there 
were enough interest.
-- 
Randolph M. Fritz • RFritz at lbl.gov
Environmental Energy Technologies Division • Lawrence Berkeley Labs


On 2011-06-16 12:34:11 -0700, Lars O. Grobe said:

> 16.06.2011 21:21, Guglielmetti, Robert wrote:
> 
>> Chris is right, we're veering, so new subject line.
>> 
>> Chris, when I got my first OSX system (2002), the difference between OSX
>> 10.1 and any Linux distro at the time was vast; there simply was no
>> comparison. I mean, really. No comparison, if we're talking barriers to
>> entry for Radiance. Today, I would say Ubuntu is pretty close to MacOS,
>> but still not quite as polished as MacOS. I use Snow Leopard, and then I
>> have WinXP, Win7, Ubuntu 11.04 VMs available on VMWare Fusion. So far I'm
>> still willing to pay the Apple tax on my hardware every few years or so.
> 
> I think it depends on what you want to do. If you want to integrate e.g. 
> with some architectural CAD, Mac has a lot of software that you will not 
> find in Linux world. If you start scripting, coupling Radiance into 
> other tools (e.g. combining it with visualization software), go into 
> heavy rendering - Linux will be the way to do so without pain. So back 
> in 2002, I was a proud user of a Powerbook, and I had Radiance installed 
> on it. However, I was suffering that I could not get some nice tools 
> working (opendx, comfortable gnuplot, useable latex-environment). And 
> heavy rendering I did using a mosix-cluster with lots (!) of cores, 
> something impossible on other platforms.
> 
> So I think it really depends on what your working conditions are. If you 
> are doing enough numerical simulation to have a dedicated machine for it 
> (something with a fast cpu, lots of memory, good cooling, but maybe no 
> sound- and graphics card and probably not even a screen as it will be 
> located far from your workdesk anyhow), that would probably be a highly 
> optimized linux installation. Everything else would just make it 
> complicated, and you would not want to have a CAD installtion on this. 
> If you are running Radiance on your work desk - hey, it is 
> multiplatform, so you can do so whatever os you use.
> 
> In this case, Mac users enjoy downloading and copying binaries provided 
> by Greg into their path and adjusting some settings. Linux users are 
> even luckier, they typically will just select Radiance and have all the 
> installation done automatically by their package manager (at least for 
> Debian and Ubuntu, Radiance is part of the distributions). Windows users 
> will suffer, as they first need to choose a way to somehow emulate a 
> unix-like environment (using e.g. cygwin). Still, it works for all of them.
> 
> Cheers, Lars.