A compatible graphics card is recommended. On Intel Linux, use a relatively modern nVidia or ATI card. Any card that Apple ships with its Macintosh systems should be fine. This will give you accelerated graphics on our viewing programs. It is possible to run without accelerated graphics, but could be painfully slow. On Intel Linux machines, you may have to install special graphics drivers for your card.

For a processor, we recommend a 1GHz Pentium 3 or 4, or a 800Mhz G3 or G4. However, only the processing steps are CPU intensive. FreeSurfer does not make use of multiple processors, and there is no support for processor-specific instruction sets (i.e. AltiVec).

For Mac OS X, you need to get X Windows running on your machine before installing FreeSurfer. You can download and install Apple's X11 here:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11
2004-Nov-19 1:04pm kteich