Hy, I want to remove my SGI-workstation and use NT or Linux on pc. I heard and looked around which seems the better choice and although I'm not a friend of Bill Gates, I did not find much disadvantages of NT. Fluent seems to be faster and the installation works without problems. Do you know of disadvantages of NT ? or real advantages of linux ? thanx Jurek

Linux is free, Linux is more stable and Linux integrates much better with your old Unix environment. Besides, if you already know Unix you wont have to learn a new environment. Why even consider NT?

Hy Jonas, thanks for your "argument-help". We discussed a lot

>Linux is free Our system-administration is done by a third-party and so the cost are nearly equal for linux and NT

>Linux is more stable Friends use other cfd-software on nt for about one year and the pc crashed two or three times -->not as stable as linux, but stable enough

>Linux integrates much better with your old Unix environment That's true for cfd. But: Most CAD-Systems are ported to NT but will not be ported to linux -> data-transfer Our "normal" environment for text, tabels... is microsoft/NT. (office, notes,..)

>Besides, if you already know Unix you wont have to learn a >new environment. We know unix but not good enough for administration (unix/linux) and we know of course the daily use of NT (not administration)

I do not want to convince anyone from NT. We also were very happy some weeks ago about the idea to work with great free linux and ban NT and Bill Gates from the hardware.

Jurek

I do not know much about fluent on Linux, but on NT platform, fluent does not run as smooth as it does on SGIs, there are so many subtle errors, sometimes it is just annoying (as I minimize the display graphics window, it will say error(): floating point...), sometimes it will even stop the iterations and I just restart the whole thing, nothing wrong.

(1). I think, if the code was written from scratch properly for a particular operating system, it should perform smoothly on that system. For example the 3-D modeling program such as 3-D Studio for PC/Dos and 3-D Studio Max for PC/NT have been used widely in 3-D graphics field. I had not trouble with these graphic programs. (2). But, if the code was originally written for UNIX system, then the porting of the code to PC system will require a lot of work. So, I would say that in most cases, it is the problem with the code instead of the operating system. (3). And in many cases, even if the code is running on the same operating system, the errors in the graphic portion of the code (say GUI related) tend to stay the same for many versions. This is because it is difficult to do the graphic programming. (4). I would say that the bugs with the code represent the overall quality of the programming effort of the code, not the problem with the operating systems used.

FYI, I've heard similar comments from developers at Fluent. They've had several NT-specific bugs. This might have been fixed now though, I don't know, I don't run Fluent on NT. I do know that Fluent on Linux runs very well though.

Please get the most recent release. FLUENT 5.4 is going to be released very soon. Many NT related defects have been fixed in recent releases.

Would you recommend NT or Linux for running Fluent on PC hardware? Assuming that all other factors are equal is the stability and bug-level in Fluent better on NT or on Linux?

Recently I saw something different (not with fluent): SGI with NT. I see: the best is not to think so much about that, just do it...

Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) will run on SGI, have the best of both worlds. Check out www.sgi.com