OK, I’ve had stabs at computer graphics on at least ten occasions in the past. Only to be stymied when software ceased to exist or becomes too expensive, or it only works in 64 bit, or appropriate modules fail to connect properly, or it requires prerequisites that require prerequisites that require prerequisites etc.

Last time I had major real successes with computer graphics was when I was programming Silicon Graphics workstations in Unix, some 25 years years ago, even before Linux was invented.

What I want to do is:

• Read a jpg, gif or video, mathematically operate on this frame by frame (eg. by adding z-buffered animated 3-D graphics in the foreground) and outputting to jpg, gif and video.
• Contour plots using krigging from statistical data.

One way to do that may be available in the C programming language (or python or R) in Linux.

So my question is:
Where can I buy a 64 bit computer suitable for computer graphics that has Linux pre-installed? The computer can be new or second hand. I don’t want windows software at all. I don’t particularly want to go through the major hassles of installing Unix myself.

This is a question both about what power and age and size and cost and type the computer has to be, to run good quality Linux animated graphics. As well as about where to buy same second hand or new.

• Where can I buy a 64 bit computer suitable for computer graphics that has Linux pre-installed? The computer can be new or second hand. I don’t want windows software at all. I don’t particularly want to go through the major hassles of installing Unix myself

When was the last time you installed a linux distro? They are very straightforward these days…

furious said:

• Where can I buy a 64 bit computer suitable for computer graphics that has Linux pre-installed? The computer can be new or second hand. I don’t want windows software at all. I don’t particularly want to go through the major hassles of installing Unix myself

When was the last time you installed a linux distro? They are very straightforward these days…

Good point. Never. Have used Linux. Have installed Cygwin, which is the windows emulator of Linux. But have never even managed to get X11 working.

Which distro of Linux? One retailer offers the following options – all Greek to me.

Is this good enough for the hardware? Only two core. 64 bit? Only 4 GB RAM. Only 500 GB internal. Would have to get rid of windows 10.

Um, Ubuntu studio? Advertises itself as good for video editing, camera, music, art, writing?

mollwollfumble said:

Is this good enough for the hardware? Only two core. 64 bit? Only 4 GB RAM. Only 500 GB internal. Would have to get rid of windows 10.

Um, Ubuntu studio? Advertises itself as good for video editing, camera, music, art, writing?

4GB of ram would seem way too small.

Funny thing, I’ve never bought a computer with Linux pre-installed. I’ve always done the setup.

In brief, I can’t answer your question.

dv said:

Funny thing, I’ve never bought a computer with Linux pre-installed. I’ve always done the setup.

In brief, I can’t answer your question.

OK. I save of the order of $100 if I do the setup myself. Suppose I want to do the setup myself. Do I remove Windows 10 first and install from DOS? Which version of Linux?

> 4GB of ram would seem way too small.

Darn, everything else seems way too small. Even dual core and 500 GB, and 1.1 GHz is slow. But going to anything bigger and I’m starting to talk real money. For something I’d only use a couple of times a year. eg. a notebook with Linux compatibility, DVD drive and >=1 TB storage – may not exist at any price, as against $489 for the above configuration.

On windows, having quad core is a complete waste for me. Only on Cygwin/Unix have I needed all four cores and loads of storage. When analysing Kepler data I used up all the all four cores and 2 TB storage. And I only managed to squeeze it into 2 TB by deleting each dataset asap.

Present PC is 4 GB RAM, 32 bit, Windows 7, 3.3 GHz, 931 GB.

What are the best programs on Linux? I’m so used to Linux/Unix being extremely powerful but a pain to use. Switching between csh, bsh, tcsh for example – gotta have the right one. Add to those vim, awk, sed, gimp, gcc, gfortran, cd, ls, grep, eyes, alias, imagemagick, tex/latex and you’re just about pushing the limit of the commands I know in Linux. Anybody here used lilypad? How do I set Linux up so that I can type ‘a.exe’ instead of the default ‘./a.exe’?

I’m tempted to re-purpose old laptop, but it’s only 32 bit and graphics tends to need 64 bit. :-(
Oh, and the battery is so dead it only runs off mains. Why don’t i try it?

mollwollfumble said:

OK, I’ve had stabs at computer graphics on at least ten occasions in the past. Only to be stymied when software ceased to exist or becomes too expensive, or it only works in 64 bit, or appropriate modules fail to connect properly, or it requires prerequisites that require prerequisites that require prerequisites etc.

The best computer graphics software I’ve programmed with have all been open source, and include:

• X through Xlib and the X toolkit Xt; X uses a C interface;
• gtk, the gimp toolkit, which offers a general purpose X interface through a C interface
• qt, another general purpose graphics development environment, this one through C++; this is the one I prefer, but you really need to know C++ to get the most out of it. Qt is cross-platform, and can be made to look and work the same on whatever platform it’s running on. A commercial licence is available for qt, but I’ve always used the open-source edition.

Also, you can install a fully-functional X server on Windows through Cygwin.
mollwollfumble said:

Last time I had major real successes with computer graphics was when I was programming Silicon Graphics workstations in Unix, some 25 years years ago, even before Linux was invented.

I’ve got some SGI machines here; recent SGIs are inferior to older models (IMHO), and I’m still using the older ones. Also, the first release of Linux was in 1991, and Torvalds’ initial announcement that he was developing it was in 1990, both more than 25 years ago.

mollwollfumble said:

What I want to do is:

• Read a jpg, gif or video, mathematically operate on this frame by frame (eg. by adding z-buffered animated 3-D graphics in the foreground) and outputting to jpg, gif and video.
• Contour plots using krigging from statistical data.

Most of those things can be done by open source tools that are already available (though not necessarily easy to use), most of which are available for Windows. For kriging, for example, see octave with the kriging stk/library
mollwollfumble said:

One way to do that may be available in the C programming language (or python or R) in Linux.

So my question is:
Where can I buy a 64 bit computer suitable for computer graphics that has Linux pre-installed? The computer can be new or second hand. I don’t want windows software at all. I don’t particularly want to go through the major hassles of installing Unix myself.

The last time I saw a new computer with linux preinstalled was about ten years ago when I bought some eee pcs, but there are some vendors listed here. Also, I’ve never found installing Unix or Linux particularly onerous, from SunOS 4.1 (in the 1990s) through recent Debian distros (although modern distros can offer an enormous number of programs to install.) Perhaps Scientific Linux, from Fermilab, CERN, DESY, and ETH Zurich would suit your needs (although it was announced last year that it would be discontinued, but would continue to be supported.)
mollwollfumble said:

This is a question both about what power and age and size and cost and type the computer has to be, to run good quality Linux animated graphics. As well as about where to buy same second hand or new.

HTH

Why don’t you dual boot your windows machine?

btm said:

mollwollfumble said:

OK, I’ve had stabs at computer graphics on at least ten occasions in the past. Only to be stymied when software ceased to exist or becomes too expensive, or it only works in 64 bit, or appropriate modules fail to connect properly, or it requires prerequisites that require prerequisites that require prerequisites etc.

The best computer graphics software I’ve programmed with have all been open source, and include:

• X through Xlib and the X toolkit Xt; X uses a C interface;
• gtk, the gimp toolkit, which offers a general purpose X interface through a C interface
• qt, another general purpose graphics development environment, this one through C++; this is the one I prefer, but you really need to know C++ to get the most out of it. Qt is cross-platform, and can be made to look and work the same on whatever platform it’s running on. A commercial licence is available for qt, but I’ve always used the open-source edition.

Also, you can install a fully-functional X server on Windows through Cygwin.
mollwollfumble said:

Last time I had major real successes with computer graphics was when I was programming Silicon Graphics workstations in Unix, some 25 years years ago, even before Linux was invented.

I’ve got some SGI machines here; recent SGIs are inferior to older models (IMHO), and I’m still using the older ones. Also, the first release of Linux was in 1991, and Torvalds’ initial announcement that he was developing it was in 1990, both more than 25 years ago.

Most of those things can be done by open source tools that are already available (though not necessarily easy to use), most of which are available for Windows. For kriging, for example, see octave with the kriging stk/library
mollwollfumble said:

One way to do that may be available in the C programming language (or python or R) in Linux.

So my question is:
Where can I buy a 64 bit computer suitable for computer graphics that has Linux pre-installed? The computer can be new or second hand. I don’t want windows software at all. I don’t particularly want to go through the major hassles of installing Unix myself.

The last time I saw a new computer with linux preinstalled was about ten years ago when I bought some eee pcs, but there are some vendors listed here. Also, I’ve never found installing Unix or Linux particularly onerous, from SunOS 4.1 (in the 1990s) through recent Debian distros (although modern distros can offer an enormous number of programs to install.) Perhaps Scientific Linux, from Fermilab, CERN, DESY, and ETH Zurich would suit your needs (although it was announced last year that it would be discontinued, but would continue to be supported.)
mollwollfumble said:

This is a question both about what power and age and size and cost and type the computer has to be, to run good quality Linux animated graphics. As well as about where to buy same second hand or new.

HTH

Wow, thanks, will try those out. Life’s too short to learn to be an expert in C++, I’ve found.

I’ve decided to try a Linux install on an old laptop, to see if I like it first, before committing to new hardware.

The old laptop turns out to be 64-bit, a pleasant surprise, but only 2 GB RAM.

Run Linux inside a virtual machine on your existing computer. Cost = $0

How? Install Vmware workstation(free) or VirtualBox(free). This allows you to build and run virtual machines.

Install one or many versions of Linux as virtual machines. My current fav Linux distro is ZorinOS.

My computer has old Windows versions(98, XP, 7), MacOS(Sierra), and various Linux distros: all as virtual machines. Windows 10 is the host system.

The number of virtual machines that you can setup is only limited by the size of your hard drives.

dv said:

Funny thing, I’ve never bought a computer with Linux pre-installed. I’ve always done the setup.

In brief, I can’t answer your question.

So what’s so wonderful abut Linux that makes it worth the effort?

Also, why can’t we get Linux phones?

Or can we?

The Rev Dodgson said:

So what’s so wonderful abut Linux that makes it worth the effort?

Also, why can’t we get Linux phones?

Or can we?

Yes, there are many Linux based phones available.

https://opensourceforu.com/2017/03/reasons-to-use-linux/

fsm said:

Run Linux inside a virtual machine on your existing computer. Cost = $0

How? Install Vmware workstation(free) or VirtualBox(free). This allows you to build and run virtual machines.

Install one or many versions of Linux as virtual machines. My current fav Linux distro is ZorinOS.

My computer has old Windows versions(98, XP, 7), MacOS(Sierra), and various Linux distros: all as virtual machines. Windows 10 is the host system.

The number of virtual machines that you can setup is only limited by the size of your hard drives.

Existing desktop is only 32 bit – not suitable for big jobs.

Yes, Cygwin is supposed to field X windows – but it doesn’t for me.

Have installed Linux on old 64 bit laptop. Not a huge success so far – 6 hours to install. Can’t record anything from microphone. Web browser refuses to connect to the internet. Lots seems to be missing, and not working.

Or in need of massive customisation, eg. not a single thing of use of the desktop, and only 6 icons top to bottom on the screen (in Windows I have 15). Finally figured out that the only way to do anything is right-click-hold-swipe-swipe-click from desktop when what I want is to reduce that to a single click.

Spreadsheet a lot better than android. Calculator may be OK. Writer has 200 badly drawn fonts, that are hard to access. Blender is a huge learning curve. Don’t see Latex, or Fortran, or eyes, most other useful executables like Python, C and C++ are hidden somewhere in the mess.

The web access failure is the worst problem so far. How do I fix that? It had web access to install Linux all right, input the modem number and password OK, but no web.

mollwollfumble said:

fsm said:

Run Linux inside a virtual machine on your existing computer. Cost = $0

How? Install Vmware workstation(free) or VirtualBox(free). This allows you to build and run virtual machines.

Install one or many versions of Linux as virtual machines. My current fav Linux distro is ZorinOS.

My computer has old Windows versions(98, XP, 7), MacOS(Sierra), and various Linux distros: all as virtual machines. Windows 10 is the host system.

The number of virtual machines that you can setup is only limited by the size of your hard drives.

Existing desktop is only 32 bit – not suitable for big jobs.

Yes, Cygwin is supposed to field X windows – but it doesn’t for me.

Have installed Linux on old 64 bit laptop. Not a huge success so far – 6 hours to install. Can’t record anything from microphone. Web browser refuses to connect to the internet. Lots seems to be missing, and not working.

Or in need of massive customisation, eg. not a single thing of use of the desktop, and only 6 icons top to bottom on the screen (in Windows I have 15). Finally figured out that the only way to do anything is right-click-hold-swipe-swipe-click from desktop when what I want is to reduce that to a single click.

Spreadsheet a lot better than android. Calculator may be OK. Writer has 200 badly drawn fonts, that are hard to access. Blender is a huge learning curve. Don’t see Latex, or Fortran, or eyes, most other useful executables like Python, C and C++ are hidden somewhere in the mess.

The web access failure is the worst problem so far. How do I fix that? It had web access to install Linux all right, input the modem number and password OK, but no web.

Got web on Linux . Good.

mollwollfumble said:

Got web on Linux. Good.

Have to type in the modem password every time I boot up Linux – bad.
Also loses my desktop layout every time I boot up Linux.
And gfortran won’t install.

Different distro perhaps. Or dig deep into the guts.

btm said:

mollwollfumble said:

OK, I’ve had stabs at computer graphics on at least ten occasions in the past. Only to be stymied when software ceased to exist or becomes too expensive, or it only works in 64 bit, or appropriate modules fail to connect properly, or it requires prerequisites that require prerequisites that require prerequisites etc.

The best computer graphics software I’ve programmed with have all been open source, and include:

• X through Xlib and the X toolkit Xt; X uses a C interface;
• gtk, the gimp toolkit, which offers a general purpose X interface through a C interface
• qt, another general purpose graphics development environment, this one through C++; this is the one I prefer, but you really need to know C++ to get the most out of it. Qt is cross-platform, and can be made to look and work the same on whatever platform it’s running on. A commercial licence is available for qt, but I’ve always used the open-source edition.

Also, you can install a fully-functional X server on Windows through Cygwin.
mollwollfumble said:

Last time I had major real successes with computer graphics was when I was programming Silicon Graphics workstations in Unix, some 25 years years ago, even before Linux was invented.

I’ve got some SGI machines here; recent SGIs are inferior to older models (IMHO), and I’m still using the older ones. Also, the first release of Linux was in 1991, and Torvalds’ initial announcement that he was developing it was in 1990, both more than 25 years ago.

Most of those things can be done by open source tools that are already available (though not necessarily easy to use), most of which are available for Windows. For kriging, for example, see octave with the kriging stk/library
mollwollfumble said:

One way to do that may be available in the C programming language (or python or R) in Linux.

So my question is:
Where can I buy a 64 bit computer suitable for computer graphics that has Linux pre-installed? The computer can be new or second hand. I don’t want windows software at all. I don’t particularly want to go through the major hassles of installing Unix myself.

The last time I saw a new computer with linux preinstalled was about ten years ago when I bought some eee pcs, but there are some vendors listed here. Also, I’ve never found installing Unix or Linux particularly onerous, from SunOS 4.1 (in the 1990s) through recent Debian distros (although modern distros can offer an enormous number of programs to install.) Perhaps Scientific Linux, from Fermilab, CERN, DESY, and ETH Zurich would suit your needs (although it was announced last year that it would be discontinued, but would continue to be supported.)
mollwollfumble said:

This is a question both about what power and age and size and cost and type the computer has to be, to run good quality Linux animated graphics. As well as about where to buy same second hand or new.

HTH

I’m rather unimpressed with Ubunta Studio. I think I’ll take your advice and try Scientific Linux instead.

furious said:

• Where can I buy a 64 bit computer suitable for computer graphics that has Linux pre-installed? The computer can be new or second hand. I don’t want windows software at all. I don’t particularly want to go through the major hassles of installing Unix myself

When was the last time you installed a linux distro? They are very straightforward these days…

For “very straightforward” substitute “impossible”.

Can you help, please, run me through it in as small a step as possible?

I’ve copied the Linux iso drive I want onto a USB.
Now I want to install Linux on a laptop.

For starters, the laptop has two disk drives c: and d: I want to combine them into a single c:
Despite not asking it to, my previous attempt at installing Linux have me a dual boot machine. I don’t want dual boot I want Linux.
The dual boot is to Windows 7 and UNetbootin
I think UNetbootin is wrong because it takes literally 10 minutes to start and it wipes every change I made in the last login session.

Attempting to boot off USB gives me the option of either plain or UEFI. The UEFI option fails completely. The plain option crashes with error message
error: disk ‘lvmid/getB03…X)NG15’ not found
then
grub rescue>

So, please run me through how installing Linux is straightforward.

I’m going to have to call in a computer professional to either reinstall or customise Linux for me.

I can’t live like this.

mollwollfumble said:

I’m going to have to call in a computer professional to either reinstall or customise Linux for me.

I can’t live like this.

Have you considered not using Linux?

Download a Linux distro iso.

Use a utility like Rufus to create a bootable usb drive using the linux iso. https://rufus.ie/

Boot to the usb drive and install Linux.

Unplug the usb drive and boot into Linux.

Easy to use Linux distros for a Windows person might be Zorin, Mint or Ubuntu.

How to install gfortran on Linux.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gfortran

Done.

fsm said:

How to install gfortran on Linux.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gfortran

Done.

but what did you type when su asked for authentication

fsm said:

How to install gfortran on Linux.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gfortran

Done.

That only works on a debian-based distro, which uses the apt package manager. Red Hat/Fedora and derivatives use rpm; others use Yum, pacman, portage, and a bunch of others.

btm said:

That only works on a debian-based distro, which uses the apt package manager. Red Hat/Fedora and derivatives use rpm; others use Yum, pacman, portage, and a bunch of others.

Yep, but you get the idea. Installing something like Fortran on Linux should be quick and simple. If it’s not, then you probably have bigger issues to deal with first.