[Quantian-general] Quantian Futures (was Re: R & Octave) (fwd)

[Robert W. Hayden]

Forwarded message:

> That does raise an interesting question. The Quantian list seems to have 
> been rather quiet of late, and I'm wondering when a new release is 
> likely. I must admit I haven't looked at the Debian repositories 
> recently, but it seems to me that most of the software in Quantian 
> 0.7.9.2 has evolved markedly in the past two years, and is presumably 
> still being tracked in Debian.
> 
> For example, the R project just released 2.6.2, Yacas is at 1.2.2 and 
> Ryacas is at 0.2-7. Octave is at 3.0.0. How difficult would it be to do 
> a hard disk install from 0.7.9.2 and then upgrade all of these?
 
Quantian is getting old and it's parent Knoppix is not changing much
either, though it has had releases since Quantian came out.  I have no
inside track to the creators, but maintianing a Linux distribution is
a LOT of work, and they may eventually come to feel that they have
made their point and turn their attention to other matters.  Certainly
if you browse free scientific software sites you will find Dirk has
more than enough to do;-)  Knoppix showed what could be done with a
live CD and hardware detection and now live CDs with good hardware
detection are commonplace.  Quantian remains a powerful tool for what
I took to be its point: to demonstrate the immense variety of
scientific software out there.  You can walk in cold to a lab where
you've never been before and boot up a powerful scientific workstation
that is probably beyond the wildest dreams of the staff.  Or you can
pass it out to students who may not need the latest software versions.

So what can Quantian lovers do in the absence of a new version?  As it
happens, I have been putting a lot of thought and effort into that
recently.  I am fairly ignorant of the internal workings of Linux and
many of you would be more successful than I in the following
experiments, but there may be value in something even Linux klutzes
can use;-)  

Recent Knoppix DVDs have included much of the scientific software in
Quantian.   This may be all you need, though I do not know the future
of Knoppix.

I tried Scientific Linux 5 and CentOS 4.  Both are serious
distributions for work rather than play BUT I found very little
scientific software readily available.  I have since erased SL5 and
may do the same with C4.

Debian 4 offers most everything I would want.  I installed from a CD
and downlaoded most of the scientific stuff I wanted in an evening.

Ubuntu was a close second though it seems rather sluggish compared to
Debian (on the same machine).  

A surprising third place went to Puppy Linux 2.14.  You can get R
2.4.0, for example, though there are problems with dependencies, for
which there are fixes on the WWW.  This is a light distro that is more
likely to boot on the kinds of junk hardware I use than any other
Linux.  My interest here is in sort of a light version of Quantian to
pass out to students.  Many students have MUCH more recent hardware
than I do but many also have comparable junk and I see requiring a
bootable DVD drive as a liability, especially in poorer countries.  
And while I would include the latest version I can, I do teach online,
and the prospect of a CD you CAN"T upgrade has great appeal.  The
first step in any troubleshooting would be "Boot from the original ISO
and do NOT load any personal settings".  Then we are all on the same
page, just as we might be in a college lab.  Puppy itself is about
60Mb so there is lots of room on a CD for scientific software.  I do
not need all the stuff in Quantian, just stuff useful to
undergraduates, not experts.  This is just something I am playing with
and it may never go beyond the library but I have burned a custom
Puppy to CD and booted another machine with it so it MIGHT be within
my limited skills to create something useful.  If I do I will have to
include/emphasize tools for creating your own custom version and avoid
giving anyone the impression that I might ever update mine;-)


------->  First-time AP Stats. teacher?  Help is on the way! See

 http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html
	    
  Robert W. Hayden in the old library at  212 Main Street (P. O. Box 450)
  North Troy, VT 05859  phone (802) 988-2587  web site http://statland.org/      
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