[tidal-users] TIDAL hardware

[Harry R. <hro...@uc...>]

Dear Denham Ward and Bill Voter,

I am (or rather was) Brian Whipp's PhD student and am currently doing 
my post-doc at UCSD. Next academic year I will be taking a faculty 
position in Sue Ward's department in Leeds UK. I have some questions 
about TIDAL that I think you might be able to help with.

We are still running TIDAL on Brian's old 386 computer from UCLA from 
way-back-when. I would very much like to swap machines to use the LINUX 
version of TIDAL that, as I understand from Steve Jenkins, you have 
been using for a couple of years.

What I would like to know is the spec's of the computer you have 
running TIDAL and whether you still use the Data Translation A/D 
boards? We have some money that will disappear VERY soon and want to 
buy a Linux machine and new boards, but I have very little experience 
with Linux and wonder if you could make some recommendations regarding 
hardware? Further to this we might get a laptop to make a more portable 
version of the system; again something I have a feeling you have done. 
Could you let me know the spec's of either the desktop or laptop 
machines and let me know what to avoid at this early stage. For 
instance, I had terrible problems when I updated the DOS-based machine 
to a pentium as there were hard-wired delays in the code (which have 
now been fixed) which meant a series of small headaches in getting 
TIDAL to  run. I am keen to avoid similar problems.

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated. Also, (as 
usual) I am sorry that I am going to have to make these decisions in a 
hurry (as the money will vanish in a couple of weeks), so any haste you 
can provide in your response would be very welcome.

Many thanks for your advice in advance.

and best wishes,

Harry

Harry B Rossiter, PhD
Research Fellow
Division of Physiology
University of California, San Diego
Tel: +1 (858) 822 2321
Fax: +1 (858) 534 4812