[Quantian-announce] New Quantian release 0.5.9.4 available
Dirk Eddelbuettel
quantian-reply@lists.alioth.debian.org
Thu, 9 Sep 2004 21:39:08 -0500
(Please see below at note [1] for a note on the posting. Thanks!)
Executive Summary:
------------------
Quantian 0.5.9.4 adds many more packages on top of the previous
release. Among the new packages are 50 new CRAN/BioConductor packages for
R, as well as a variety of other packages such as pcb, gpsim, gnucap,
xcircuit, transcalc, xd3d, QtiPlot, the Alliance VHDL and more. Packages
such as Gnumeric and LyX are re-introduced, and a few small packaging bugs
have been corrected. The total size of the iso is now 1.74gb corresponding
to about 5.5gb uncomressed.
===================================
Announcing Quantian release 0.5.9.4
===================================
I What is it?
---------------
Quantian is a remastering of Knoppix, the self-configuring and directly
bootable cdrom/dvd that turns any pc or laptop into a full-featured Linux
workstation, and clusterKnoppix, which adds support for openMosix.
However, Quantian differs from (cluster)Knoppix by adding a large set
of programs of interest to applied or theoretical workers in
quantitative or data-driven fields.
See http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html for more details.
II What is new?
----------------
o Fourth release based on Knoppix 3.4 with many changes from both new and
updated packages, still based on Knoppix 3.4 and the clusterKnoppix
release from May 10 with kernel 2.4.26 with the 'testing status'
openMosix patch as well as a non-openMosix kernel 2.6.6 -- this may
become the final '0.5.9.*' release and get relabelled 0.6 unless new
bugs are found.
o New Quantian software includes
- another 50 GNU R packages from CRAN and BioConductor provided
unparalled depth for statistical computing with a total of 440
R packages;
- re-introduced Gnumeric as well as LyX and LyX-Qt;
- pcb to complement GNU eda as suggested by Chris Steigies;
- a variety of astronomy-related packages suggested by Gopal Narayanan:
saoimage, gpsim, gnucap, oregano, icom, xcircuit, vipec, xsmc-calc,
transcalc, setiathome, tkseti, xplanet, xplanet-images;
- two new visualisation packages: xd3d and QtiPlot;
- Alliance, a complete CAD tool and library for VLSI;
- several fixes suggested or provided by Marco Caliari, included a
boot splash screen and improved minirt24/minirt26 boot images;
- header packages for atlas3 and lam are now included
- plus lots of fancy GL screensavers;
o Total size is now about 1.74gb for the compressed iso image,
corresponding to more than 5.5gb of uncompressed software;
o As the underlying kernel is unchanged, the cdrom size version of
0.5.9.2, as well as the small 7gb bootable cdrom provided by Marco
Caliari can still be used to boot this image if no bootable dvd is
available;
o Now with three main download sites:
-- at University of Washington in Seattle, Washington:
http://www.analytics.washington.edu/downloads/quantian/
which also provides bittorrents and bittorrent monitors:
http://www.analytics.washington.edu:6969/
-- at Debian's Alioth site (hosted in California ?):
http://quantian.alioth.debian.org/
-- and now also from Greg Warnes' machine research.warnes.net
hosted at the CS department at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut:
http://research.warnes.net/downloads/quantian/CURRENT/
o And of course still available:the mailing lists for Quantian
Following the 0.4.9.3 release, a Quantian project was opened on
alioth.debian.org. So far the only use of the alioth infrastructure
has been the creation of two mailing lists
quantian-announce for announcements, intended to be low volume
quantian-general for general discussions about Quantian
Please go to
http://alioth.debian.org/mail/?group_id=1425
for subscription info etc., and start using the quantian-general lists
for general questions, comments, suggestions or discussions about
Quantian.
Quantian-general is subscribed to quantian-announce, so you only need
to subscribe to one (but can of course subscribe to both).
I also set the Reply-To: for this message to
quantian-general@lists.alioth.debian.org so that discussions can be
continued on the list.
o See http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian/changelog.html for details.
III Where do I get it?
----------------------
o Downloads are available from the three main hosts already listed
above:
http://www.analytics.washington.edu/downloads/quantian/
http://quantian.alioth.debian.org/
http://research.warnes.net/downloads/quantian/CURRENT/
one of which already has torrents running on 0.5.9.4:
http://www.analytics.washington.edu:6969/
o European mirrors, bittorrent site and cdrom vendors will hopefully
catch up over the next few days. See
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html
for download info.
o As with the previous releases, dvd/cdrom vendors should have pre-made
offerings available within a few days.
IV Known Bugs
--------------
o cdrdao is not setuid root, should get fixed in the next release.
V Other items
---------------
o Mailing lists have been created, see above.
o Feedback / poll on package additions or removal
As always, I welcome comments and suggestions about programs to be
added or removed. Existing Debian packages get pushed to the front of
the line.
Please send feedback, questions, comments, ... to the
quantian-general@lists.alioth.debian.org
list to maximise the number of eyes glancing at any one question.
For the same reason, the reply-to address for this announcement is set
to the quantian-general list.
[1] Note
This email is sent to those whose email addresses are in my quantian
mail folder due to prior emails, plus LWN and DWN who had run previous
announcements, and as suggested, the openmosix-general, clusterknoppix
and debian-knoppix lists. Anybody who considers this unwanted is kindly
asked to send me a private mail and I will immediately remove the
corresponding alias entry.
Best regards, Dirk
--
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
-- Groucho Marx