Re: [seul-sci] sci linux

[Rainer Wichmann <st8h304@hs.uni-hamburg.de>]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2000, T. Rashid wrote:

> MOST PEOPLE DON'T EVEN KNOW THAT GOOD SCI APPS FOR LINUX EVEN
> EXIST!!!!!!!!!

Depends on the particular field of science and its tradition with respect
to computers.

There are people that don't even know that there are serious sci apps for M$ -
in astronomy, if it runs on M$, a lot of people would take for granted 
it is for amateurs only ;-). No institute I know uses anything but UNIX or
Linux for science.

There is 'Linux for Astronomy' (http://www.randomfactory.com/lfa.html),
which includes many precompiled major astro software packages, plus RedHat,
plus an installer, on two cd. I do not use it - it is cheaper to download from
the net - but it is a nice concept.

It is certainly not that easy to produce something alike for a science 
that doesn't have the same UNIX (and VMS, in the dark old days ...) tradition
as astronomy, but I think the availability of such an easy-to-install software
collection for other sciences would boost the acceptance of Linux quite a bit.

rainer