I'm going to put linux on one of my laptops essentially to run matlab. Does anyone have any recommendations on what distribution of linux I should get?

The computer is a Toshiba 3.2 ghz with 512 mb of ram and 75gb hd.

Thanks.

 

I'm sure all of the Linux people will get their word in shortly (I'm a Mac/Windows guy) but from what I've used Ubuntu is a great and easy way to get involved with Linux. Give a Live CD a spin; you can boot from it and not have to install. Good test drive.

SIDENOTE: Get some more RAM. Your computer will love you for it, and it's cheap enough.

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Yeah its an older laptop that I recently resurrected from the dead. Matlab doesn't currently enjoy the multicore technology, it likes one big fast processor which is why I want to bring the laptop over to linux.

I'm going to look into new ram though, have to figure out if it can handle it first though.

 

Matlab 2007a was the 1st be mult-threaded and thus "like" more then one core/cpu.

As to distro go for Ubuntu simplest way in all fairness. Since they have a corporate backing alot of dev goes into making it very user-friendly and support alot out of the box.

At the end of the day all distro's are basically the same (the 2.6.# kernel dev change helped this alot) and since now are all pretty much internet-based and updated regually this also help's

which leave the differences very small between distro's limited to the likes of package-management (rpm,deb,tgz...), init scripts, customs apps for config...

I can jack into any linux box and do GNU/Linux stuff because they are all the same, specific distro package management and such will take a bit of poking to figure out simply because they are all GNU/Linux

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I took your advice and went with Ubuntu. I like it so far, it takes a little getting used to but seems nice.

Thanks

 

Unless he's going to do video editing, re-encoding compiling huge programs then I'd disagree. I only have 256MB of RAM and Mandriva runs reasonably quick on my machine.

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Doesn't matlab love RAM though? Plus, there are performance increases with more RAM; cheaper than buying a new processor...

__________________
-Ian

 

Matlab loves ram. If I could put 16 gb in (and afford it) I would. Although my understanding is the new version has some better memory management features, but I've yet to try it.

Edit:

And yes I work on very large problems, which is why I'm having this issue in the first place. I would love to be able to simulate a semi-practical radar system, but I have to settle for small because my computer simply doesn't have the computational power/memory. But I'd settle for even just marginally larger.

For example a matrix (data cube) that I'd like to work with in matlab would be 1000x700x350 of complex entries. At current the best I can do is about 600x400x200 of complex entries.

I can write it where it calculates the parts of the data cube that the program needs on the fly but that slows the processing down tremendously.

 

How olds the laptop? if you have a laptop with SATA and the newer video adapters you could have a problem with around 70% of the distros. that 70% definitely could be made to work - but only with a bit of tinkering (I don't know how much you know about Linux).

If it's a new laptop try OpenSuSe 10.3

Mark

 

o.O I don't think so

__________________
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Well I went with Ubuntu on one laptop and Mandriva on another. So far I think I prefer Mandriva, but maybe simply because it looks prettier. Both work well though, and quite easy to install.

 

I think I would go with Knoppix...

rgds