[Quantian-announce] New Quantian release 0.5.9.2 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 0.5.9.2
===================================


I   What is it?

    Quantian is a remastering of Knoppix, the self-configuring and directly
    bootable cdrom/dvd that turns any pc or laptop into a full-featured Linux
    workstation, and clusterKnoppix, which adds 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 Second release based on Knoppix 3.4 with many changes from both
      new and updated packages, still based on Knoppix 3.4 and the
      clusterKnoppix release from May 10 with kernel 2.4.26 with the
      'testing status' openMosix patch as well as 
      a non-openMosix kernel 2.6.6;

    o New Quantian software includes
      - added bioinformatics software with release 1.4 of BioConductor
      - more bioinformatics with bioperl, biopython, emboss and hmmer
      - four large R packages from the Rmetrics.org project for 
        financial engineering and computational finance 
      - yet more CRAN packages for R such lme4, matrix, psy
      - science packages kalzium, celestia, starplot, openbabel, chemtool,
        xtide, viewmol, achilles and blast2
      - the qemu emulator

    o Upgraded throughout against Debian testing with 430 package upgrades
      including current versions of X11, Gcc et al, Perl, apt/dpkg/dselect,
      R, and gretl

    o Upgraded custom artwork in an improved background image, thanks again
      to Ed Pegg, Jr.

    o Total size is now 1.2gb for the compressed iso image, corresponding to
      more than 3.5gb of uncompressed software.

    o Mailing lists for Quantian up and running

      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.

      Quantian-general is subscribed to quantian-announce, so you only need
      to subscribe to one (but can of course subscribe to both).
      
      I also set the Reply-To: for this message to
      quantian-general@lists.alioth.debian.org   so that discussions can be
      continued on the list.

    o 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 European mirrors, 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 None right now -- so please test away! 


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.

      Please send feedback, questions, comments, ... to the 
      
	quantian-general@lists.alioth.debian.org

      list to maximise the number of eyes glancing at any one question.

Best regards,  Dirk

-- 
"Cheney has the mouth of a sailor, which is odd for someone who did 
everything he could to stay out of the Navy," one observer said.
          -- Andy Borowitz, http://borowitzreport.com, 26 June 2004