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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 17 February 2008 at 11:29, Robert W. Hayden wrote:
| 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
[...]
| 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

:-) Yep. I also have a demanding job I quite enjoy.

| 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.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, I'm standing in that corner too.  

Debian now has viable live-cdrom technology, so we can use that.  Coupled
with the demise of openMosix (sad, but true) I am bound to return to 'core
Debian', probably with a subset of packages from the last (and rather large)
Quantian DVD. We'll see.  It would be nice if we could fit it onto a cheap
usb stick -- so 2gb may be an upper limit.

But I'll probably focus on 'just what is in Debian' (which is a lot more than
during the last Quantian iterations) which is both easier for me, more
prudent in terms of what I can actually redistribute and the right policy
signal anyway. [ Ie to all those who will email me that eg scilab is missing:
fine, get it into Debian, then we'll talk. ]

Another advantage is that we could more easily build an amd64 version as we
won't start from Knoppix.

As for clustering etc: too bad we don't have openMosix, but with my Debian
maintainer hat on, I can assure you that Open MPI (for parallel computing)
and Slurm (for job scheduling) work just fine.

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

I like Ubuntu too and use it as well. We could conceivably use it as a
starting point too, so I remain more familiar with Debian.

That said, I'll give a 3 hr tutorial at UseR 2008 in Dortmund in August (see
http://www.statistik.uni-dortmund.de/useR-2008/tutorials/eddelbuettel.html )
and I may or may not have an R-centric live cdrom/dvd ready for that :)

Thanks for the constructive feedback.

Regards, Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.