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My Workstation OS: Scientific Linux
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CommentsScientific Linux has been around for quite some time, but has made no effort to publicize itself in other than the scientific community. An announcement of upgrade on DistroWatch gained the attention of a wider community.
Scientific Linux began as Fermi Linux, at the famous Fermilab, whose mission is to explore high-energy physics, the science of matter, and space and time. Scientific Linux is a vendor-cleansed version of the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux, completely recompiled from source. Stable versions include the 3x and 4x vendor tree and are called Scientific Linux, though they still bear the earmarks of the Fermilab craftsmanship that is a major part of it. It is completely open source, free, and available to anyone.
An exciting aspect of this distribution is that the CERN lab in Switzerland is now directly involved with its development and maintenance. Both Fermilab and CERN use SL as their primary operating system, as do a number of leading U.S. and European physics research laboratories and universities throughout the world.
SL is made for and used in both i386 and x86_64. At CERN, at least 100 machine have installed upon them the x86_64 version. Fermi's entire facility, "banks and banks" of computers, use SL as servers and workstations.
When SL developers Connie Sieh and Troy Dawson at Fermilab and Jarek Polok of CERN receive a vendor distribution, or new errata, they check the code for any problems that might be inherent, and they fix them. In general, this means that every stable release is rock-solid. After all, this is the tool that is part of the driving force behind the largest linear accelerator in the world.
The facilities at which this Linux version is used require security, so you can rely on the security of this distribution. It is constructed to be functional and secure for years to come.
SL developers have been fastidious in their removal of vendor identifiers, and precise about using open source program. They feel they have created a stable base that users can easily customize by pointing at their own repositories, if they choose to.
SL includes GNOME, KDE, and IceWM desktops. For applications, SL features the latest Firefox, OpenOffice.org, the Helix and XMMS media players, JPilot for synchronizing with Palm OS devices, and many other packages. In addition to these, I use the GIMP, Thunderbird, Synaptic (the remarkable APT interface), and Samba and SSH for networking, all of which SL installs by default, except Thunderbird.
It's easy to add applications to SL that are not included in the distribution. A Google search found some Xine-related RPMs that I easily added to let me to watch DVDs and stream media. I also downloaded and installed the OpenOffice.org 2 beta and the Drivel LiveJournal client.
SL's Web site is simple and straightforward. The project's mailing lists are useful, intense, and without the deviations from the project at hand that sometimes impair other distributions' attempts to move forward. The emails from various labs throughout the world are fascinating to read because of the meticulous deliberation that goes into problem-solving with the scientific method. Their servers are blazing fast for download and updates. This past week, SL added a Commnity section to its Web site.
If you need a Linux distro that has undergone the scrutiny of some of the world's foremost scientists, you can't do better than SL. It's also exciting to know you're using the same distribution that's being used by leaders of the scientific community throughout the world, who are studying the real "final frontiers": space and time.
What's your desktop OS of choice? So far, we've heard from fans of FreeBSD, Mepis Linux, Debian, Xandros, Slackware, Windows XP, Lycoris, SUSE Professional, NetBSD, Ubuntu, FreeDOS, Libranet, Mandrakelinux, Arch Linux, Mac OS X, Knoppix, Linspire, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS, Yoper, Fedora Core 3, Windows 2000 Professional, Damn Small Linux, VidaLinux, Kanotix, VectorLinux, and Irix.
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on My Workstation OS: Scientific LinuxNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
Geek Unorthodox
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.
Maybe you get excited about these things when you retire... although to be fair it would be nice to have time to be excited...
That's the trouble with being part of the Nintendo generation... nothing excites us anymore :
1. There is no such thing as a "standard" Linux distribution.
2. I am retired because I am disabled, the result of serving my country, so no, things certainly didn't get more exciting when I was retired.
3. I find many exciteable minds in every generation, including the so-called "Nintendo Genration," whatever that is. It would be sad to spend my waning years as jaded and pessimistic as such an individual as yourself seems to be.
4. There is nothing "weird" about excitement, or the article, or about myself. The shoot-from-the-hip title and post seem to have nothing to do with the article, nothing to contribute, and are, consequently, simply lazy writing. And unnecessarily rude. And rudeness is the sole property of an individual, not a generation.
William Roddy
I have moved to Ubuntu which uses the Debian packaging system that has dependecy resolution built-in. I mostly use the Synaptic tool but that is a just a GUI front end, not an add-on tool that tries to workaround a broken system.
I used Mandrake for years and it used to be just RH recompiled for Pentiums. I loved the URPMI tool that took care of dependency's for you but it was still a workaround of a packaging system that is broken.
I have moved to Ubuntu which uses the Debian packaging system that has dependecy resolution built-in. I mostly use the Synaptic tool but that is a just a GUI front end, not an add-on tool that tries to workaround a broken system.
Where is the comparison of apt with rpm? Your nitpicking is off-base. I've come to the same general conclusion as the original poster: Debian-based distros are stabler and easier to manage than RH-based ones.
Right here goes with the explanation:
I loved the URPMI
Yup, I still appreciate it - it is a tool which sits on top of RPM to provide Dependency resolution and repository handling capabilities. Mandrake provide there own GUI tools, collectively called drakrpm.
So the stack goes:
1) RPM
2) URPMI
3) DrakRPM
Ubuntu which uses the Debian packaging system
Ah, the debian package management system. I like this too, I tend to use debian on my servers...
The debian package management system has a number of layers as well. The grand parent mentioned dpkg, this is the base of the "debian package management system. As with RPMs, this is unable to automatically resolve dependencies. Above this are dselect and apt - one is a ncurses front end to dpkg, the other a set of command line utilities, which provides the automatic dependency resolution. Above that there are, like drakrpm in Mandrake (or now Mandriva), various GUIs which utilise the apt tools.
So the stack goes:
1) dpkg
2) apt / dselect
3) Synaptic
Now, as you may be able to see from the too above lists, each stack is made up of 3 levels. Early RPM based systems historically stopped at level 1. I.e. all package management had to be done with RPM, however for many years Mandrake have included URPMI, other rpm distributions have similar tools.
Debians complementary stack was historically a little more advanced, it was at level 2 and most people consider the "Debian packaging system" to referrer to the apt set of tools. Later GUI apps were placed on top.
Though developed later URPMI is just the RPM systems equivalent to apt, thus when making comparisons, comparisons should be made between dpkg and rpm; urpmi and apt or Synaptic and drakrpm.
In your original post you inferred a comparison between rpm and apt. As the grand parent post pointed out and as I have detailed above, the correct comparison would be between dpkg and rpm - which have similar roles. Therefore the grand parent's point still stands.
As for Debian systems tending to be more stable than Redhat based ones, this many be more of an issue of philosophies. Debian strives to provide a very stable system, Redhat to provide as stable a system as can be with up-to-date versions of packages. Debian achieves its stability at the expense of having completely up-to-date versions of packages. A cursory glance would suggest that this is not the case with Ubuntu, so as to why it is more stable I can only assume that this is either down to the polish placed on the packages by each distribution or by not comparing the latest versions of each distribution respectively - don't forget that each distribution is built vastly on top of identical code.
This distro has both apt and yum for updating and installing. Both of these tools take care of the dependencies of rpms.
Gerry Tool
There are a few minor modifications to RHEL that SL implements. Mostly support for the internal file sharing networks of CERN and Fermilab, IIRC. Really, they use RHEL as a base because they have to keep builds of software frameworks (CERNlib, Geant, etc.) consistent across the networks. SL exists because it's too expensive to maintain RHEL on all the machines.
What scientific, mathematical, etc tools does it come with?
My Workstation OS: Scientific Linux
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 134.79.81.36] on February 08, 2008 10:13 PMMy Workstation OS: Scientific Linux
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 209.226.184.106] on February 29, 2008 02:26 AMMy Workstation OS: Scientific Linux - trying out SL
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 85.127.249.142] on March 10, 2008 09:38 AM1) install virtualbox
2) create in it a new virtual machine + set the downloaded SL iso image as cdrom device
3) start the newly created virtual machine and boot from the cdrom (SL iso image)
4) install SL onto your virtual machine
5) enjoy a fully running SL installation ;)
What about "science"?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 27, 2005 05:57 PM#