via e-mail:
I provide Unix/Linux support to researchers at Mass. Gen. Hospital. A researcher here has asked me to provide a product spec for a Linux workstation on which they want to run AFNI as well as SPM2 and a locally created program called FreeSurfer. All 3 say Linux is OK (with a lot of memory, good graphics, etc).

The researcher's group doesn't have much Linux in-house resources and I can only provide limited support (time issues, etc). They probably want to use pre-compiled bins. Looking at your ftp site, I only see linux for glibc2.1 and 2.2. Recent kernels are compiled with 2.3.

Wondering if you plan to make a distro for 2.3 available soon?
Thanks. Dennis J. Gurgul

Reply:
* The glibc21 AFNI binaries are no longer being updated. I'll probably remove them from the site someday very soon.
* The glibc22 AFNI binaries will probably go away sometime in the next few months, as fewer and fewer machines run with Linux/gcc/glibc that old.
* The gcc32 AFNI binaries are compiled with gcc 3.2 and glibc 2.3, and are what you want for recent releases of Linux (e.g., RedHat 9).

For people without much Linux expertise (or desire to acquire it), I might recommend a Mac OS X machine instead (G5 CPU if you can afford it). This is what I use mostly these days, and I like it a lot. AFNI works on this, but I can't speak for SPM (which requires Matlab) or FreeSurfer. Rick Hoge, who is also at MGH, is a big Mac fan and can probably provide more feedback on these issues.

In any case, I recommend at least 1 GB of RAM (2 GB is better), and lots of disk space. For Linux, we've had luck with the nVidia graphics cards and their OpenGL support (which FreeSurfer requires and the SUMA part of AFNI also needs). The Mac display software is built on OpenGL, so support for it is automatic if you go that route.

AFNI is updated fairly frequently. The best way to stay up-to-date is to use the UPDATER script, which is available at our download page. When executed, it will download the binaries for your system and install them. You have to configure this script to tell it which binary package to get and what directory to put them into. After that, you could set this up as a weekly (say) cron job.

bob cox