Running Digital Micrograph on Linux and Mac OSX
Gatan Digital Micrograph (DM) software is considered an industry standard among microscopists. The offline DM application is freely available from Gatan. Unfortunately, DM software has been designed to run only on Microsoft Windows operating systems, thus distancing the microscopy community from popular Unix-based systems, such as Linux or Mac OSX. An ad hoc solution to this problem has required a virtualized Windows operating system running on top of the user's native operating system. This is not only slow, having to emulate each processor instruction, but also requires installation and licensing of Windows and the virtualization software. However, with the aid of open-source resources, it is possible to run DM natively on Linux and Mac OSX (Figure 1). This article was written as a guide with easy-to-follow installation instructions to liberate users from the Windows emulation pidgeonhole and enable them to freely analyze data on Unix-based systems.