Announcing the "Quantian Scientific Computing Environment"

A Knoppix / Debian variant tailored to
numerical and quantitative analysis

Quantian is a remastering of Knoppix, the self-configuring bootable cdrom
that turns any pc or laptop into a full-featured Linux workstation. This
version is based on Knoppix 3.2 (2003-05-20), an earlier release based on
Knoppix 3.1 (2003-01-20) is still available; see below for URLs.

Quantian differs from Knoppix by adding a set of programs of interest to
applied or theoretical workers in quantitative or data-driven fields. The
added programs include

o R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda,
mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib), out-of-the box support for the
powerful ESS modes for Emacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program
o Octave with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk,
matwrap and Inline::Octave
o Maxima, including the x11 front-end and emacs support
o the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) incl example binaries
o the Pari/GP, Gap, Ginac and Yacas computer algebra systems
o the Quantlib quantitative finance library incl. the Python interface
o the OpenDX and Mayavi data visualization systems
o TeXmacs for wysiwyg (La)TeX editing
o and various other programs such apcalc, aribas, autoclass, euler, evolver,
freefem, gambit, geg, geomview, glpk, gnuplot, gperiodic, gmt, gretl,
lp-solve, mcl, multimix, rasmol, plotutils, pgapack, pspp, pdl, rcalc,
yorick and xlispstat

while at the same time retaining programs and features already in Knoppix:

o Auto-configuration of graphics, sound, disks, networking, auxiliary
devices which is second to none among computer installations
o The current version 3.1 of the KDE desktop environment
o The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers
in releases 2.95, 3.2 and 3.3 as well as gcj in version 3.2
o Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, ...
o The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as kate, joe, kate, nedit and zile
o A complete teTeX TeX and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing
o Gnumeric, Abiword, Koffice, ... office tools
o a Swiss-army knife collection of networking tools allowing access
to wired and wireless lans, covering ethernet, isdn or dial-up modems

In total, over 1200 Debian packages are included.

Quantian iso images are available at

http://software.biostat.washington.edu/edd/quantian/
http://franz.stat.wisc.edu/~edd/quantian/

and a Quantian overview page, including a recent paper, is at

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html

Plans for future versions are not set in stone but may entail support for
OpenMosix clustering. Comments, questions, feedback are more than welcome!

-- Dirk Eddelbuettel <[email protected]> Wed, 28 May 2003 18:42:40 -0500