I am working in scientific computing and developing a petsc-based application for a multi-cpu-system.
For debugging purposes, I want to install that very software on my own pc, which is a dual-core system running Ubuntu (Karmic Koala).
But I do not know which resources to use. There are debian packages, as well as sources-archives on the web. I know there are various issues when compiling and linking these packages, therefore this trouble is what I want to avoid most!
I do not care about performance (at least not too much), as I will use this software only for debugging, hence usability is most important to me.
Can somebody give advice?
Use native (i.e. Ubuntu) packages when they exist and you don't have any specific reason to do otherwise.