Hello everyone on the list - a new
member here, living in rural Pembrokeshire where I am
happily retired with a younger wife, older malt whiskey, 5
Border Collies, 2 cats and chickens
in the orchard. Maybe a brief intro before some
?Biobuntu? comments?
I am an old code pusher/scientist -
scientific programming, physics, graphics, etc etc. [The
horrors of Fortran77!]. I did do some bsd and
Silicon Graphics (purple machine) unix back
in the early '80s - '86 or so, but thats mostly all gone
now, so basically I treat myself (and want
to be regarded as) as a Linux noob. It is far
friendlier than I remember all that stuff being back
then ... vast improvements in useability and effectiveness
have obviously occured. And I even
still recognize some of the words! Nowadays my
interests run more to Guild Wars and Oblivion,
and modifying and fiddling with my PC, rather than code
pushing. Why am I moving to Ubuntu? [Dual booting XP Pro
and Ubuntu Dapper right now]. I HATE Windoze! And Vista promises to be
a real monster. And one can buy a lot of single malts and dog food for
its price! A special 'Hello' to Tony Arnold,
University of Manchester, simply because of his location.
1959, old EE Building, U Manchester is where I was first
seduced by computers - the old Ferranti
Mercury machine. Two 8kb disk drives (Wow!), stone
tablet input, illuminated manuscript output,
racks of glowing 6SN7 double triodes ... . A real
computer! I was an undergrad over in Physics,
Schuster Building? Happy memories! [Got my
degree in '61 and immediately left for the U.S.A.
as part of the 'brain drain', had a
semi-decent education and career over there for 40+
years]. I would have loved to have
volunteered to help at Linux World somehow (we very occasionally
visit London) but that time frame is out, and anyway I
have some minor difficulties with travel (like
wheelchair, oxygen ...). But if there is maybe a way
I could help the ubuntu cause, at least please
ask ... . [Especially if it involves killing
Orcs, Trolls and Goblins!]
?Biobuntu? O.K., WHY another release
based on another (admittedly good) distro? Most
potential users of the Vigyaan live CD are, imho, not going to be opening
it up and modifying
codes. They want packages that work "out of the box" and with all the
gory OS details hidden.
Imho, anyway. And why should the originators of all the
separate packages be in favour of and
support yet another distro basis? Knoppix is not, imho, too friendly,
but it is hidden from the user
in Vigyaan, and does the job reasonably well.
?Question? on the side - anyone know a ref to a decent
and fairly objective review and comparision of a number of the current live
cd distros? Friendliness, useability, bugginess (is
that a word? - you all know what I mean!), modifiability, blah blah
blah? By the way, on the topic
of distros, a friend turned up the other day with a copy of mepis. I
was not too impressed with the
package itself, except for the documentation! Which I think was
first-rate! Ubuntu could maybe,
imho, learn from the mepis style and content of docs??
Back to ?Biobuntu? There
are any number of fields where a collection of packages, comparable to Vigyaan
but
running on Ubuntu, might be useful/valuable. At random:
- Statistics (Stabuntu?),
emphasis on ecological, zoological, biological - spatial patterns,
clustering,
dynamics, classification ... .
- Or Pure Mathematics: topology (folding, knots,
polyhedra,..); cellular automata; number
theory; tensor calculus (thats symbolic
stuff); graph theory; some basic symbolic maths?, ...
. - Or an area I came across
recently - systems and compartmental, state variable modelling,
in
biology and
medicine. Korn & Korn's Desire; the NIH compartmental modelling codes
(name
escapes me);
s-plane transfer function modelling; etc etc . Since a lot of the
users might be
medical
and clinical, you really need to insulate them from the OS details!
Ubuntu may be ideal here.
The key here, I think, is to get 1 or 2 captive experts
in the area, who can reliably advise on packages .
Plus someone to handle all the (massive?) paperwork!
Anyway,
Hello People!
Off to a
Maddy Prior concert!
Michael aka Nackles
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