Between semesters I have been looking at the Quantian scientific
computing environment, "A Knoppix / Debian variant tailored to numerical
and quantitative analysis."
Knoppix is a "live CD Linux", that is, it boots from a CD, and the
entire OS is on the CD. So it can run on any x86 machine that can
boot from a CD. Your home directory and configuration (/etc) can be
saved to a floppy or USB device. The Quantian varient is loaded with
just about every bit of technical software that you can imagine ...
TeX, Grace, xfig, TeXmacs, octave, maxima, scilab, ipython, matplotlib,
etc etc. Most of it I've never even heard of. I've been very
impressed. It works really well. The only downside is that you can't
easily upgrade or install new software. (You can do it, but the key
word is 'easily'.) That's the trade-off for a completely portable Linux
scientific environment: wait for the next version.
But vpython is missing. I asked the developer, Dirk Eddelbuettel, about
adding it, and he replied
"
Sounds cool. Once again, packaged in Debian would my life a hell of a lot
easier -- so could you file an 'rfp' bug against the virtual wnpp package?
If you use the reportbug(1) tool, a stanza should appear that you can fill
with some data we commonly supply for 'request for packages' bug.
"
This paragraph may as well be written in Greek. I assume it's in
Debianese. Can anyone interpret and comment on the feasibility of doing
this? Is it a big deal? I also assume one needs a Debian to prepare
the pacakge. Volunteers?
some fine print about Quantian:
Knoppix fits on a CD, but Quantian is too big. It's actually a "live
DVD". But if you, like me, can't burn DVDs there's a very easy
work-around.
There is a facility to make a permanent installation to hard drive.
Then you can update using apt-get. But the installer is rudimentary,
and puts everything in one partition. Not the best.
It also appears to be possible to install to an external USB drive and
boot directly from that if your bios supports it. ( I've gotten Fedora
to boot that way after a fair amount of work under the hood, but it
appears that Knoppix has it built-in. Not sure about that ... my (used
/ ebay) external USB drive crashed as I was trying it out.)
-gary
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