Leginon

Depending on the way that you run Leginon, you may not need the drive mapping. Here are two ways to run Leginon and the difference between them:

OPTION 1) Sit at a linux machine and run the main Leginon interface on the linux machine, which is connected through a network to the TEM Windows machine. In this case, you do not need to map a network drive, because Leginon will handle the transfer of data from Windows to Linux. Your main Leginon interface running on Linux will actually do the write to disk. You do not need to use Samba. If your file server is not the same machine as the linux system you run Leginon, you will still need to set up NFS server on the file server, and NFS client on your Leginon computer.

OPTION 2) Sit at the TEM and run main Leginon interface on the Windows PC connected to the TEM. In this case, you will probably want to store the images to a remote file server. That will allow a web server to easily access the images so web clients can view the images you are acquiring. This is where you will want the drive mapping. First you set up a Samba (SMB) server on the remote file server. Consult documentation for your linux distribution to do that. Then on the TEM Windows PC, you map the drive. In the Map Network Drive dialog, select any drive letter that is not already used. For the folder, you enter something like: \\hostname\share
where "hostname" is the host name of your Samba server, and "share" is the label you gave to the shared folder when you configure your Samba server. Here is our example:
On Linux machine with host name "smbserver" running Samba server, we want to make this directory a shared folder:
/ami/data00
In the Samba config file (smb.conf) we set up a share called [amidata00] which points to /ami/data00

On Windows, we map the network drive like this:

*Drive: Z:

*Folder: \\smbserver\amidata00
Also on the Windows machine, we need this in leginon.cfg:>[Drive Mapping]
Z: /ami/data00 because Leginon needs to know the "linux" name for Z drive.

Also, when you fill in the [Images] section of leginon.cfg, always use the "linux" path, even on the Windows PC. So in our example, we store all our images in directory (on linux): /ami/data00/leginon/
leginon.cfg says:>[Images]
path: /ami/data00/leginon NOT:

path: Z:\leginon

Thank you for the information! I think I understand the process of how to connect the computers better now. So, is Option 1 you gave above the same as Setup A in page 20 of the Leginon-1.6 installation manual (i.e. 1 Windows computer to microscope + 1 Linux computer for all other functions)? That's the one that I was using until now. If it is, then I suppose I'm doing ok! <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_biggrin.gif" alt=":D" title="Very Happy" />

Hooray, everything is hooked up and we got our first real image! It's a little overexposed in bits, but it's not just noise! The two machines are talking to each other properly and the microscope is sending the data to the MySQL database we set up. We now need to do the calibrations for future exposures and properly configure the database for more users, but so far, we are very energized by this progress!

Thank you so much for the help so far! <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_biggrin.gif" alt=":D" title="Very Happy" />