[Quantian-general] Re: Virtual Machine Version
Dirk Eddelbuettel
edd at debian.org
Thu Mar 2 15:43:00 UTC 2006
Brent,
Thanks for the note. I am ccing quantian-general where I prefer Quantian
posts. If you want to follow-up, you need to *subscribe* there first or
it'll bounce.
On 1 March 2006 at 22:43, Brent Myers wrote:
| Dirk,
|
| Understanding that VMWare's Workbench is expensive software, their windows
| VM viewer is free. Anyone running windows can run a virtual machine with a
I do not know what VMWare Workbench is, but as I wrote on my blog at the end
December and beginning of January, the 'free as in beer' VMWare Player can
happily run Quantian on either a Windows or Linux host. I should update the
main Quantian page and mention it there more prominently too.
| custom OS for free. A VMWare version of Quantian would be really useful to a
| very wide audience - me in particular. Perhaps someone in the user community
| has access to VMWare. Hmm...I'm just now looking...there is a 30-day trial,
| I'll consider that option.
There is a lot more. You can now win thousands of dollars if you create a what
they call an appliance -- as I understand it, it simply means repackaging.
VMware even gives you free VMware Workstation copies to do that.
I am unlikely to have time to undertake that but if somebody else feels so
inclined...
Regards, Dirk
|
| Thanks for your efforts,
| Brent
|
| D. Brenton Myers
| Graduate Fellow
| University of Missouri
| Soil Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences
| email: myersdb at missouri.edu
|
| -----Original Message-----
| From: quantian-announce-bounces at lists.alioth.debian.org
| [mailto:quantian-announce-bounces at lists.alioth.debian.org] On Behalf Of Dirk
| Eddelbuettel
| Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 8:34 PM
| To: quantian-announce
| Subject: [Quantian-announce] New Quantian release 0.7.9.2 available
|
|
|
| (Please see note [1] below regarding recipients for this posting. Thanks!)
|
|
| Executive Summary:
|
| Quantian 0.7.9.2 is the second Quantian release based on Knoppix 4.0.2.
| Quantian adds hundreds of scientific / numeric packages, as well as the
| an openMosix enabled 2.4.27 kernel, to the cdrom version of Knoppix.
| Version 0.7.9.2 ships as one compressed iso file of 2.7gb that is
|
| Relative to the previous release 0.7.9.1, several small bugs have been
| fixed, Sun's Java 1.5.0 SDK has been added along with several Java-based
| applications (ImageJ, Weka, JGR, Mondrian), several other applications
| have been added, yet more R packages from CRAN and BioC are included and
| a few other packages have been updated.
|
| Quantian now contains over 2550 Debian packages, over 870 packages
| for R and a few extra applications.
|
| Quantian comes as one bootable dvd iso of 2.85 gb (compressed) with
| over 7.6 gb (uncompressed) of software of interest to quantitative
| analysists, scientists, researchers or students.
|
|
| Announcing Quantian release 0.7.9.2
| ===================================
|
|
| 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 (parts of) clusterKnoppix, which adds support for
| openMosix-based cluster computing. However, Quantian differs from
| Knoppix by having a particular focus on quantitative, numerical or
| scientific applications, and hence adds a very large set of programs of
| interest to applied or theoretical workers in quantitative or
| data-driven
| fields to the solid base provided by Knoppix..
|
| See http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html for more details.
|
|
| II What Quantian highlights should I care about ?
|
| o Second release based on Knoppix 4.0.2: Derived from the cdrom version
| of
| Knoppix, Quantian utilises the unionfs setup of Knoppix to combine two
| compressed loop images for a total of 2.85 gb (from two files of 1.66
| gb
| and 1.19 gb) corresponding to over 7.6 gb of software.
|
| o KDE 3.4/3.5, Kernel 2.6.12; added backport of kernel 2.4.27 with
| openMosix patch for continued openMosix support including unionfs
| support (that was missing in 0.7.9.1)
|
| o Some highlights in 0.7.9.2 are
|
| - Java support via the 'Java 1.5.0' SDK from Sun, installed via
| the packages from www.debian-unofficial.org; this allowed us to
| add ImageJ, Weka, Mondrian and JGR.
|
| - some other packages that were added: celestia, cervisia, gcj,
| gnuhtml2latex, inkscape, octplot, oprofile, prospect, praat, rserve,
| wxmaxima, xalan, (x)orsa as well as many library additions/upgrades
|
| - even more complete R support with 877 packages (25 from 'core R',
| another 76 from Debian packages, and 779 directly installed from
| CRAN
| and BioConductor, covering over 99% of all packages at CRAN and
| BioConductor [ not counting a handful of windows-only CRAN packages]
| for complete coverage as of 25 Feb 2006), ESS editing in Emacs /
| XEmacs, GGobi visualization, Rpad webinterface, the award winning
| JGR
| 'Java GUI for R', RSPerl, Rserve, an early release of the RKward GUI
| and more.
|
| - continued strong bioinformatics/biology support:
| BioConductor, arb, biofox, bioperl, biopython, blast2, boxshade,
| bugsx, clustalw, fastdnaml, fastlink, garlic, gromacs, hmmer, loki,
| mipe, molphy, muscle, ncbi, phylip, rasmol, readseq, seaview,
| t-coffee, textopo, ImageJ, and more;
|
| - continued strong mathematics / computational algrebra support:
| axiom,
| blacs, calc, euler, gap, giac, mathomatic, maxima, pari, scalapack,
| scilab, texmacs, yacas, yorick;
|
| - continued strong visualization / graphics support: dx, garlic, gdpc,
| gnuplot, grace, grass, gri, illuminator, kst, labplot, mayavi,
| matplot, proj, plplot, plotmtv, rasmol, starplot, vtk, xd3d, xgraph,
| ygraph;
|
| - large number of programming and scripting languages, editors,
| debuggers and libraries;
|
| - excellent latex support with auctex, lyx, kile, texmacs interface,
| as well as numerous macro packages, bibtex tools;
|
| - office support via openoffice and koffice suites, abiword, gnumeric
| and other applications;
|
| - plus all the tools and toys from the current Knoppix relase.
|
| o See http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian/changelog.html for details.
|
| o See http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian/howto.html for several
| short HOWTOs on booting Quantian from hd on either Windows or Linux,
| booting via a bootcd (such as clusterKnoppix), or botting from a
| USB memory device. Contributions, corrections, and feedback on these
| HOWTOs is always appreciated.
|
|
| III Where do I get it?
|
| o Downloads are available from the main host at Seattle at FHCRC:
|
| http://quantian.fhcrc.org/
| rsync://quantian.fhcrc.org/quantian/
|
| and at the East Coast at
|
| http://research.warnes.net/downloads/quantian/CURRENT/
| ftp://research.warnes.net/users/edd/quantian/CURRENT/
|
| The most recent release is also available at
|
| http://quantian.alioth.debian.org/
|
| Note that file size of 2.75 gb may upset web caching system such
| as squid. It may be prudent to rely on rsync or bittorrent instead
| of http.
|
| o Bittorrents should be available shortly at
|
| http://www.tlm-project.org/public/distributions/quantian/
|
| o The main European mirrors should catch up shortly:
|
| http://sunsite.rediris.es/mirror/quantian
|
| http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/ftp/pub/Linux/quantian
|
| o CD/DVD vendors will probably update their offerings soon as well.
| See the Quantian site for a list.
|
|
| IV Mailing lists
|
| o Two mailing lists exist for Quantian
|
| quantian-announce for announcements, intended to be low
| volume
| quantian-general for general discussions about Quantian
|
| available via
|
| http://alioth.debian.org/mail/?group_id=30303
|
| 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). Posting to
| quantian-general requires a subscription.
|
| Reply-To: for this message is quantian-general at lists.alioth.debian.org
| so that discussions can be continued on the list.
|
|
| V Bugs fixed from 0.7.9.1
|
| o The missing default boot option for isolinux has been added, simply
| pressing return at the boot prompt (or waiting) now yields kernel 2.6.
|
| o Marco Caliari figured out how to add unionfs support to Kernel 2.4.27,
| so we now have openMosix support with the full 7.5 gb of software!
|
| o Progress from Debian's C++ transition allowed us to update many KDE
| packages, including kdvi. KDE is in parts updates to release 3.5, some
| applications are still from release 3.4. Several other applications
| that were uninstallable in 0.7.9.1 because of C++ library conflicts
| (celestia, gdal) are now included.
|
|
| VI Known Bugs in 0.7.9.2
|
| o Only under kernel 2.4.27, kdesktop comes up with an error message
| that needs to be acknowledged. Konsole then has a broken color schema.
| Simply selecting a working schema, and manually running kdesktop fixes
| this.
|
| o No other issue as of 28 Feb 2006. Please report anything you notice
| to the quantian-general mailing list.
|
|
| VII Other items
|
| 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, and possibly existing
| rpm packages, typically get inserted quite readily.
|
| Please send feedback, questions, comments, ... to the
|
| quantian-general at lists.alioth.debian.org
|
| list to maximise the number of eyes glancing at any one question.
| Notice that a subscription to the list is needed in order to post.
|
| o Feedback would also be appreciated on ways to better communicate with
| difference scientific communities that could be interested in
| Quantian.
|
|
| VIII Notes
|
| [1] This email is sent via the quantian-announce mailing list. I have
| subscribed those whose email addresses are in my quantian mail
| folder
| due to prior emails. The quantian-announce mailing list only sends
| moderator-approved posts -- so there should be no spam whatsoever.
| Anybody who considers this unwanted is kindly asked to send me
| a private mail to get unsubscribed immediately.
|
|
| Best regards, Dirk
|
|
| --
| Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
| -- Thomas A. Edison
|
| _______________________________________________
| Quantian-announce mailing list
| Quantian-announce at lists.alioth.debian.org
| http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/quantian-announce
|
|
--
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
-- Thomas A. Edison
More information about the Quantian-general
mailing list