Laboratory for Scientific Computing

Laptops

LSC-owned Laptops

The following also relates to laptops given to students as part of the Materials CDT.

LSC has a number of laptops which it can lend to those students that need them. The laptops are installed with Ubuntu 16.04, the same as the main network, and often dual-boot with Windows 10.

Updating laptops

Normal software updates happen automatically, every day. This may occasionally mean that Firefox (or similar programs) display a restart message.

Configuration updates

The laptops periodically check for updates to their configuration, or for extra software packages to be installed. However, this only happens when they are on the wired LSC network, i.e. in one of the LSC/CDT offices.

You can trigger the update manually by running:

sudo update_laptop

Extra packages

If you need extra software installing, you should be able to find a way to install it in a location you can already write to. For example, most packages that compile from source will allow the install location to be changed.

If you cannot do this, please ask a system-administrator to install the package for you. If it is something that will be useful to all students, it may end up being added to the central configuration.

Graphics Drivers

Graphics cards for laptops are tricky to deal with in Linux, so the following is a guide to what you can expect:

AMD graphics card

If you have a laptop with an AMD GPU, then unfortunately you will not be able to use it properly under Linux. At the time of writing I (pmb39) have tried installing the AMD Catalyst Driver, but it fails to work, probably due to issues of there being two GPUs, one on the main CPU, and the discrete AMD one. If you manage to solve this issue, please let me know.

NVIDIA GPU (Optimus)

If your laptop has an NVIDIA GPU with Optimus technology, then you are in a better situation than with an AMD GPU. The issue is the same in that there are two GPUs, one from Intel and one from NVIDIA, and the switch between them does not work properly under Linux.

However, the appropriate NVIDIA drivers do install correctly, and will allow you to use CUDA on them. The CUDA toolkit version 8.0 is installed under /opt/cuda-8.0.

Other problems

If you have any problems using LSC/CDT laptops, please contact a system administrator.