Bioinformatics on a CentOS 7 workstation

Recently the lab upgraded to a Dell Precision Tower 7910 which comes with two Intel® Xeon(R) E5-2670 v3 CPUs. Decided to try CentOS 7 because Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 were giving some (yet unknown) problems. I'll list here the things I did for a basic setup to be able to do bioinformatics and statistics stuff, just in case anyone needs help.

The main difference is how packages (rpm vs. deb) are installed (yum vs. apt-get) and also perhaps what comes pre-installed with each system.

Installation
CentOS 7 comes with a graphical installer, that gives you a list of options of what you want. I went for the GNOME desktop option.

Partitioning: by default it will go with the LVM scheme using the XFS filesystem. I modified mine to ext4 (you can read more here), and the layout is like this (for 2TB HDD, sda has Windows 7/8 pre-installed).

Filesystem                Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb4                  48G  261M   46G   1% /
devtmpfs                   63G     0   63G   0% /dev
tmpfs                      63G  290M   63G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                      63G   18M   63G   1% /run
tmpfs                      63G     0   63G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdb3                  96G  6.6G   85G   8% /usr
/dev/sdb5                  48G   58M   46G   1% /tmp
/dev/sdb7                  20G  1.2G   17G   7% /var
/dev/sdb2                 494M   94M  401M  19% /boot
/dev/sdb1                 200M  9.6M  191M   5% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb8                 1.6T   31G  1.5T   3% /home
/dev/sda3                 1.9T  239G  1.6T  13% /run/media/diana/OS

Packages and repositories
You will need the EPEL repo for many packages

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm

Some key packages I had to install to bring the fresh installation up to speed.

sudo yum install ntfs-3g libxml2 libxml2-devel libcurl libcurl-devel scipy

Bioinformatics/stats-related

More to come soon.