Mac and Linux users will have new operating systems available soon. We'll be adding support for these new operating systems and phasing out support for older versions in the coming months. Please read below to find out how these changes will impact your software installation:
Mac Users:
Apple recently announced the release of Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). The public beta is now available and the official release is slated for the fall. This upgrade is Apple's fourth in the past five years, with releases for 10.9 (Mavericks) in October 2013, 10.8 (Mountain Lion) in July 2012, 10.7 (Lion) in July 2011, and 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in August 2009. SBGrid currently supports all of these versions, but with the adoption of Yosemite, we will phase out support for Mac OS X 10.6 over several months and concentrate our efforts on supporting the most recent 64-bit versions of the Mac OS.
If you are using Mac OS X 10.6 you are missing out on the performance improvements in software and hardware that Apple has introduced over the past 5 years. Most of our members would benefit from upgrading to a 64-bit kernel, available in Mac OS X 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion) or 10.9.4 (Mavericks). Note: Mavericks is currently available to users of older operating systems from Apple as a free upgrade.
Please remember that if you are still running 32-bit applications, most of these applications can run on the newest versions of the Mac OS. If your application needs specific 32-bit kernel extensions, however, your upgrade options are limited to a Mac OS that can still run a 32-bit kernel (Mac OS X 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10 only run 64-bit kernels). But, in this case you could still upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7!
If you need to run legacy PowerPC applications using the Rosetta environment, you cannot upgrade. Snow Leopard 10.6 is the last version to offer this support.
Finally, if you are interested in upgrading to Yosemite, please note that there are known issues with popular crystallographic software packages and Yosemite. These problems can only be addressed adequately by the developers of the affected programs. Early adopters may have to wait for their favorite software to catch up. We will begin testing the SBGrid Software releases on Yosemite in the near future.
Linux Users:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, CentOS, and Scientific Linux (SL) have each announced the version 7 release of their operating systems. Red Hat and CentOS7 are already available and SL7 will be released later this summer. If your group is currently using version 5 from any of these Linux flavors, we recommend that you plan an upgrade to version 6, and eventually version 7, soon.
With the advent of Red Hat, CentOS, and the forthcoming SL version 7 releases, users that continue with version 5 will be missing out on ~5 years of development work (version 5 was first released in March 2007 and Version 6 in November 2009). These improvements include significant advancements in performance, storage, security, and a nicer User Interface.
SBGrid currently supports Red Hat/CentOS/SL versions 5 & 6 and will soon begin testing the SBGrid Software collection on version 7. Once version 7 is fully supported, we will begin to phase out support for version 5 and concentrate our efforts on supporting the two most recent versions (6 and 7) of these operating systems.
If you are planning to quickly upgrade to these newest versions - Red Hat/CentOS/SL version 7 or Mac OS X Yosemite - please contact us as at help@sbgrid.org to discuss the pros and cons. Our updated list of supported Operating Systems is available at https://www.sbgrid.org/wiki/software/operatingsystems