A Glance at Other Science-Oriented Knoppix Variants

Scientists can always use good operating systems. We've examined ParallelKnoppix and ClusterKnoppix, which are both extremely useful for computationally heavy science and math research. Following are some other Knoppix-derived, science-oriented distributions that may be helpful to you.

BioKnoppix

BioKnoppix is a Knoppix-derived distribution that includes many biology tools, such as Artemis, Bioconductor, Bioperl, BioPython, ClustalX, Cn3D, EMBOSS, ImageJ, Jemboss, and Rasmol. It is a product of the University of Puerto Rico's High Performance Computing facility, and its home page is http://bioknoppix.hpcf.upr.edu/.

DistCCKnoppix

DistCCKnoppix is a tiny Knoppix derivative developed by James Greenhalgh of Open Door Software. At the time of writing, it is just 50MB, but it can boot a computer into distcc slave mode, allowing for distributed compilation of programs. Its home page is http://opendoorsoftware.com/cgi/http.pl?cookies=1&p=distccKNOPPIX.

Morphix-NLP

Morphix-NLP is a Morphix-derived LiveCD containing many Natural Language Processing tools, created by Zhang Le of China's Northeastern University NLP Lab. It includes many packages at all levels of language processing, from tokenization to machine learning. Its home page is http://morphix-nlp.berlios.de/.

It includes the following applications: AntConc, Brill's TBL Tagger, CMU-Cambridge Statistical Language Modeling Toolkit v2, Collins Parser, Festival, fnTBL, fnTBL tagger, ICTCLAS, Link Grammar, LoPar, Maximum Entropy Modeling Toolkit, Memory Based Tagger, MXPOST, MXTERMINATOR, Ngram Statistics Package, N-gram tools, QTag, Qtoken, SNoW (Sparse Network of Winnows), SVM-light, Tilburg Memory Based Learner, Tree-Tagger, Trigger Toolkit, and unaccent.

PaiPix

PaiPix is a general science-oriented Knoppix derivative. It includes the usual suspects (Grass GIS, R, and LaTeX), as well as an MPI implementation. Most interestingly, it also supports AFS, enabling you to access data stored in an AFS cell. It was developed by the Post-Graduate Course of Applied Programming and Instrumentation of the College of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, and its home page is http://aamorimsrv.fis.fc.ul.pt/.

It includes the following applications: AMIDE, Ant, Dia, Festival, freeFem, freeFem3D, GCC Version 4 (including FORTRAN and Java support), GEANT3, gEDA, Gmsh, GMT, GrADS, Grass, HERWIG, ISAJET, Jikes, Kaffe (pthreads), Kile, KPovModeler, LAM4, LAPACK, LaTeX, Maxima, MPI (MPICH), MySQL, NGSPICE, Octave, omniORB, OpenAFS, Opensched, PAW (CERN), pcb, PostgreSQL, PVM, PYTHIA, QMTest, R, RTAI, Scilab, TeXmacs, Umbrello, Verilog, Vis5d, VTK, and XMedCon.

Quantian

Quantian is a ClusterKnoppix-derived distribution with a strong focus on numeric analysis. It comes with many mathematical packages installed by default, including a full LaTeX environment. It can also be used to create OpenMosix clusters. It was created by Dirk Eddelbuettel, and its homepage is http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html.

It includes the following applications: Axiom, BioConductor, BioPERL, Biopython, Blast2, Bochs, Cernlib, ClustalW, EMBOSS, FreeFem, GAP, GGobi, GiNaC, GMT, Grass, GSL, HMMER, Inline::Octave, Kile, Lyx, Maxima, Mayavi, MPI (MPICH), Numeric Python, Octave, OpenDX, Pari/GP, QEMU, QuantLib, R (including most of CRAN), SciPy, TeXmacs, Wine, and YaCaS.