Actually, it's the support commitment. Many of the High Energy Physics experiments want to freeze at a given release for the lifteime of an experiment production run, often on the order of 3-5 years. So one of the major goals of the Fermi Linux and later Scientific Linux distros is to maintain security errata, etc. for 3-5 years on major releases.
As to software included, at the moment it's mainly things like OpenAFS and XFS filesystem support, and CERN of course includes cernlib in their distribution; but many of the scientific packages are distributed via other means (
<a href="http://www.fnal.gov/docs/products/ups" title="fnal.gov">ups/upd</a fnal.gov>, <a href="http://asis.web.cern.ch/asis/" title="web.cern.ch">ASIS</a web.cern.ch>, <a href="http://physics.bu.edu/~youssef/pacman/" title="bu.edu">pacman</a bu.edu>) that are multi-platform.
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Re:What about "science"?
Posted by: mengel on May 27, 2005 11:15 PMAs to software included, at the moment it's mainly things like OpenAFS and XFS filesystem support, and CERN of course includes cernlib in their distribution; but many of the scientific packages are distributed via other means (
<a href="http://www.fnal.gov/docs/products/ups" title="fnal.gov">ups/upd</a fnal.gov>, <a href="http://asis.web.cern.ch/asis/" title="web.cern.ch">ASIS</a web.cern.ch>, <a href="http://physics.bu.edu/~youssef/pacman/" title="bu.edu">pacman</a bu.edu>) that are multi-platform.
#