[Quantian-announce] New Quantian release 0.4.9.4 available

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

[ This email is sent to those whose email addresses are in my quantian
   mail folder due to prior emails, plus LWN and DWN who had run previous
   announcements, and as suggested, the openmosix-general, clusterknoppix
   and debian-knoppix lists. Anybody who considers this unwanted is kindly
   asked to send me a private mail and I will immediately remove the 
   corresponding alias entry. --edd ]


Announcing Quantian release 0.4.9.4 
===================================

I   What is it?

    Quantian is a remastering of Knoppix, the self-configuring and directly
    bootable cdrom that turns any pc or laptop into a full-featured Linux
    workstation. Recent versions of Quantian are based on clusterKnoppix 
    and add support for openMosix. However, Quantian differs from
    (cluster)Knoppix by adding a large set of programs of interest to applied
    or theoretical workers in quantitative or data-driven fields. 

    See http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html for more details.
    
II  What is new?

    o Mailing lists for Quantian are now available

      Following the 0.4.9.3 release, a Quantian project was opened on
      alioth.debian.org.  So far the only use of the alioth infrastructure
      has been the creation of two mailing lists

        quantian-announce	     for announcements, intended to be low volume
        quantian-general	     for general discussions about Quantian

     Please go to    

       http://alioth.debian.org/mail/?group_id=1425

     for subscription info etc., and start using the quantian-general lists for
     general questions, comments, suggestions or discussions about Quantian.

    o For the very first time, *two* versions are released: 

      -- a 'kitchen sink' version of about 950mb suitable 
         hard-disk booting via lilo (see the HOWTO on the Quantian site),
         but not for cdroms. It may also work for bootable dvds.

      -- a standard cdrom size iso of just under 700mb

    o Based on kernel 2.4.24

    o Many packages updated from the previous 0.4.9.3 release

    o The 'kitchen sink' version retains all packages from clusterKnoppix,
      adds everything Quantian usually adds plus openOffice, scilab and grass.

    o The 'cdrom' version needed to remove grass, gcj and a few
      libraries to clear space.

    o Quantitative packages have been updated throughout.

    o Autodiscovery is now aided by a forced 'promisc' setting on eth0.

    Also see http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian/changelog.html for details.


III Where do I get it?

    Downloads are available from the two main hosts both of which also
    provide rsync:

    o U of Washington:  
      - http://www.analytics.washington.edu/downloads/quantian
      - rsync://www.analytics.washington.edu::quantian

    o U of Wisconsin/Madison:  
      - http://franz.stat.wisc.edu/~edd/quantian
      - rsync://rsync.r-project.org::quantian

    o European mirror, bittorrent site and cdrom vendors will hopefully
      catch up over the next few days. See 

	    http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html
 
      for download info.


IV  Known Bugs

    o Based on kernel 2.4.24 -- this is an improvement over Quantian
      0.4.9.3 with kernel 2.4.22, but unfortunately the openMosix patch
      for 2.4.25 isn't quite ready yet. 

    o openMosix autodiscovery issue for certain network cards addressed with
      explicit setting of 'promisc' mode to the eth0 interface

V   Other items

    o Mailing lists have been created, see above.

    o Feedback / poll on package additions or removal

      As always, I welcome comments and suggestions about programs to be
      added or removed. Existing Debian packages get pushed to the front of
      the line.

Best regards,  Dirk

-- 
The relationship between the computed price and reality is as yet unknown.  
                                             -- From the pac(8) manual page