Which version of Ubuntu suits me best?

Hi,

I am new to root and I would like to know which operating system should I install on my computer? I understand that in Ubuntu 20, the installation presents problems due to its very new version, while in Ubuntu 18 the process is normal and there is more information online.

I am also new to using ubuntu and this is why it seems more difficult to think about ubuntu 20, unless there are good guides.

Thank you very much for attending

Diego

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

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Can you recommend a video or tutorial text guide for installation?

There’s some instructions here https://root.cern/install/#download-a-pre-compiled-binary-distribution

On the side, I’ve recently been working on a Snap package for ROOT. My target audience is for people new to ROOT / Linux, so if you were willing to consider it I’d really appreciate any feedback you might have on it. Installing it on Ubuntu is as simple as

sudo snap install root-framework
root

Or you can even go into the Ubuntu appstore and search for it graphically. It’ll add ROOT to the Ubuntu start menu too for some extra convienience. The main difference is that if you wanted to use PyROOT, run pyroot rather than Python directly. Otherwise I’m hoping for a lot of people like yourself it’d be effectively identical to the regular ROOT packages, but I’d love any feedback :slight_smile:

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Thank you very much James, I already installed that and it was quick. I would like to know if it is the pre-compiler or something smaller? I see that it is somewhat more compact, does this have all the usual Root tools or is it more reduced?

You can run the usual root-config to get the compile options. The extra root utilities such as hadd and rootbrowse will be there too, the package is heavily compressed and is really about 1.3GB rather than the approximate 500MB to download and store it, header files just compress particularly well. PyROOT (with the pyroot command), CPU based TMVA, graphical output / OpenGL, PROOF and a lot of other core functionality should work, and heck, even root --notebook should work.

There are some caveats, snap packages are mostly blind to anything else on the system, so if you wanted to install custom Python modules for example its not for you. But for someone new to ROOT and Linux this might not be a concern. In the worst case, you can run sudo snap remove root-framework and it’s gone, and the guarantees the snap format makes means it isn’t messy so doesn’t leave over any system files and was like it was never there at all, and use the normal packages if you’d prefer.

I’m currently writing a blog post about the snap so there should be something more concrete for an introduction soon :slight_smile:

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