Bio-Linux has been released !

Bio-Linux is an ideal system for scientists handling and analysing biological data.

Bio-Linux 6.0 is a fully featured, powerful, configurable and easy to maintain bioinformatics workstation. Bio-Linux provides more than 500 bioinformatics programs on an Ubuntu Linux 10.04 base. There is a graphical menu for bioinformatics programs, as well as easy access to the Bio-Linux bioinformatics documentation system and sample data useful for testing programs. You can also install Bio-Linux packages to handle new generation sequence data types.

You can install Bio-Linux on your machine, either as the only operating system, or as part of a dual-boot setup which allows you to use your current system and Bio-Linux on the same hardware.

Bio-Linux also runs Live from the DVD or a USB stick. This runs in the memory of your machine and does not involve installing anything. This is a great, no-hassle way to try out Bio-Linux, demonstrate or teach with it, or to work with when you are on the move.

Bio-Linux is built on open source systems and software, and so is free to to install and use. See What's new on Bio-Linux 6.0. Also, check out the  2006 paper on Bio-Linux and open source systems for biologists.

Getting Bio-Linux is simple. Just download the image, burn it to a DVD or USB stick and boot the machine from that media.

Running Bio-Linux as a live system

You can run Bio-Linux by booting your computer from the memory stick. To do this, you need to set the machine to boot from a USB port.

On common computers, you can press the F12 key as the machine is starting up. This loads up a menu allowing you to choose a boot device for that session. When you want to run a Bio-Linux Live Session or install Bio-Linux from the memory stick, simply choose the option: boot from a USB device.

If you wish to set this as a permanent option, then you can press F2 instead of F12 as the machine is starting up. This will allow you to configure the BIOS of your computer to establish an order of devices to boot from. You can make the USB memory stick the first device on the list. After this, your machine will always look first into USB ports for USB devices and will boot from them if they are bootable.

Download Bio-Linux at Here.

SystemRescueCd 2.4.0 has been released !

SystemRescueCd 2.4.0 has been released, its an updated version of the specialist live CD containing a large collection of open-source utilities for disk partitioning and data rescue tasks. The new release comes with the brand-new GParted 0.10.0, the latest X.Org Server and Mozilla Firefox, while DHCP has been upgraded to the 4.x series.



SystemRescueCd is a Gentoo-based Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM or USB drive, designed for repairing a system and data after a crash. It also aims to provide an easy way to carry out administration tasks on a computer, such as creating and editing hard disk partitions. It contains many useful system utilities (GNU Parted, PartImage, FSTools) and some basic ones (editors, Midnight Commander, network tools). It aims to be very easy to use. 

The kernel of the system supports all of today's most important file systems, including ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS, Reiser4FS, btrfs, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660, as well as network file systems, such as Samba and NFS.

Whats changed from old version:
Updated standard kernels to Linux 3.0.8 (rescuecd + rescue64); updated alternative kernels to Linux 3.1.0 (altker32 + altker64); dropped Reiser4 patch from all kernels (no patch for Linux 3.x); updated X.Org Server to 1.10.4 (graphical server and drivers); updated Mozilla Firefox to 7.0.1; updated GParted to 0.10.0; patched Parted 2.4 with fixes from Fedora.

Download this new release at Here.

UER: Ubuntu for Electronics Hobbyist

Ubuntu Electronics Remix (UER) is Ubuntu derivative with electronics software included. The aim of the project is to make using Ubuntu for electronics as easy as possible. UER provides a LiveDVD of open source electronics software. Simply download it, burn it to disk and put it in your PC, and start using the software.

UER is a feature rich Linux distribution with broad range of electronics software such as Circuit and PCB Design, Schematics editors, Gerber file viewer, PIC development IDE, Choice of code editors, GCC and SDCC compilers, and come with HDL Programming Software like VHDL Simulator,
Verilog Simulator, Waveform viewer and Choice of HDL Editors. For education usage, UER is feature with Circuit simulation, Resistor calculator and Example circuits and code.

Btw, The first live DVD of UER will be has been released. Check the launchpad page for more information about UER, and for getting some tutorials about UER can be reached at here.

ZEN-mini 2010 has been released

ZEN-mini 2010 or ZEN, based on PCLinuxOS, is a minimal Linux livecd that is bootable and can be installed. It comes with a very basic GNOME desktop without additional applications. It is designed for advanced users or for users who wish to learn how to customize their system with the applications and support files they want to use.

Additional software can be installed through the Synaptic Software Manager (requires network connection). Add your own background, window decorations, web browser client, email client, music client and fully trick out your desktop the way you want it.

Now, ZEN-mini 2010 has been released. Built with GNOME 2.30, kernel 2.6.32.11 bfs, addlocale, and including fixed pulse audio.

You can download this mini PCLinuxOS at Here. ISO size only 343mb!

Chakra, KDE Mod LiveCD

Chakra is a free, user-friendly and extremely powerful liveCD and/or operating system based on the award winning K Desktop Environment and on the GNU/Linux distribution for connoisseurs: Arch Linux.

With rolling releases, freshly cooked packages, its graphical tools and a small but strong and diverse community, it is the computing environment you may have been waiting for. Chakra and Arch's community-driven development is grounded in the concept of KISS, which has been proven to be superior for people who really want to learn something about Linux or dont want to deal with administrative overhead, or are just lazy nerds like ourselves.

The team of Chakra's goal is to provide a operating system for desktops that is easy to use, but still has all the functionality, clarity, power and speediness of a KISS operating system. In the long term, the team want to build an operating system based on Arch Linux that meets most requirements desktop users have today, like easy installation of software, graphical system administration, configuring power management on mobile devices or sharing an internet connection. To be better able to fulfill this goal, they strongly rely on users who report bugs, send in feature requests and ideas for improvements, and of course participate in development.

Although this might sound like a distro for Linux newbies, these are not its primary target audience, at least not for the moment. Chakra is made for techy people and competent GNU/Linux users with a passion for KDE, KISS and such stuff, who dont fear to get their hands dirty but want to set up a usable desktop system quickly and easily.

By the way, you can download this live CD at Here.

Finnix - Another Small Linux

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 89.0 for the x86 (and now AMD64), PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms.

Finnix 89.0 features Linux 2.6.18, a new “finnix64″ AMD64 boot profile, netboot support with a built-in netboot setup wizard, MD RAID and LUKS crypt autodetection.

AMD64 support
An AMD64 kernel is now included on the Finnix x86 CD. To use this kernel on an AMD64/EM64T machine, type “finnix64″ at the boot prompt. While the Finnix userland is still 32-bit, using an AMD64 kernel on a supported platform yields several advantages:

* More than 4GB memory can be utilized natively.
* Statically-compiled AMD64 applications can be executed.
* You can chroot into native 64-bit AMD64 filesystems.

This addition gives a total of 6 supported kernel environments: x86, AMD64, PowerPC, PPC64, User Mode Linux, and Xen.

Netboot support
Finnix can now be booted via a network. A NFS server export is set up with the Finnix files in it, and the kernel and initrd are served to the user via TFTP. The Finnix CD contains a utility called finnix-netboot-server, which allows one Finnix instance to serve as a NFS/TFTP server for a Finnix netboot instance.

RAID/LUKS autodetection
Previous Finnix installations would detect and automatically set up LVM volumes. Finnix 89.0 goes two steps further with autodetection for md-based software RAID arrays, and LUKS-based dm-crypt encrypted partitions. Software RAID arrays are set up automatically if all array parts are found, while LUKS partitions are set up if the user types in a valid decryption password for each partition.

You can get it here.

DeLi Linux

DeLi Linux stands for "Desktop Light" Linux. It is a Linux Distribution for old computers, from 486 to Pentium MMX 166 or so. It's focused on desktop usage.
DeLi Linux project includes email clients, graphical web browser, an office package with word processor and spreadsheet, and so on. A full install, including XFree and development tools, needs not more than 250 MB of harddisk space.

The trick is, that DeLi Linux uses only "lightweight" alternative software. If you are looking for the newest KDE, GNOME or Mozilla, DeLi Linux will not make you happy. The test computer is a 486 laptop with 16 MB RAM, and all apps which comes with DeLi Linux are running smoothly.

"Why the heck make a Linux for such old crap ?" you may ask. There are still many computers around with the configuration mentioned above, it would be a shame to waste them. Many people simply cannot buy a 2 Ghz machine for 1000 $ or more, but they can buy a Pentium I 133 for 40 $ from ebay.

Many people are still happy with the computer they bought five years ago. Especially in the so-called third world, new hardware is not affordable. Well, there's still Windows95 or Windows 3.1, which will run on these machines, too. But these versions are not supported by Microsoft anymore, they are no longer in production, and finally, you will not get any software for this old Windows version.

What's New in This Release:

· DeLi Linux 0.7.2 is the next and possibly the last release in the 0.7.x branch. DeLi Linux 0.7.2 have the following new features: Linux kernel 2.4.34.4; X.Org 7.2; a new default web browser, Konq-E (Konqueror Embedded) which has Javascript and CSS support; the pdq print system, which replaces lprng; improved and bug-fixed delisetup, deliget and netinstall; other new packages includes nano, Gutenprint, gv and xaw3d, and the new Liberation fonts from Red Hat.
You can get DeLi Linux here.

Vector Linux

Speed, performance, stability -- these are attributes that set VectorLinux apart in the crowded field of Linux distributions. VectorLinux is a lighterweight, fast, Linux operating system for Intel-AMD x86 compatible systems and is based upon Slackware, one of the original Linux distributions. Slackware is the true 'Unix' of Linux distributions and its popularity stems from the fact that it is a robust, versatile and almost unbreakable system. VectorLinux has improved Slackware to produce a bloat free, easy to install, configure and maintain operating system that is second to none. We include automatic hardware configuration, unique administration tools and easy software package management via the Gslapt/slapt-get system. VectorLinux is considered to be the fastest, non-source Linux distribution on the planet!
The VectorLinux team is proud to announce the release of VectorLinux 5.8 GOLD LIVE CD and the first SOHO-5.8 alpha live CD and DVD. This is the final release for 5.8 standard GOLD live. The hard drive installer that has been problematic is fixed and should work well. The SOHO 5.8 alpha live comes in either CD or DVD versions. The DVD version includes all that is in the SOHO-5.8 install release plus 62 additional language packs for KDE. The CD version has lost some funtionality due to size constraints. The development tool chain and OpenOffice (replaced by Koffice) were removed. However, for demo purposes the CD live version of SOHO-5.8 should work well.

These live CD's demo all that is making the 5.8 Vector release famous like browser plugins, seamonkey firefox and opera, the newest xfce4 desktop, The Gimp and Xara LX, Abiword and Gnumeric, vasm and vl-hot, wireless drivers and configuration tools, support for read and write to ntfs via fuse and ntfs-3g, and lots of fun and games.
You can download the ISO here.

SLAX - The Pocket Linux

SLAX is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which fits on small (3.14") CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing. The Live CD described here is based on the Slackware Linux distribution and uses Unification File System (also known as unionfs), allowing read-only filesystem to behave as a writable one, saving all changes to memory.

Imagine the ability to boot your favorite Linux distribution whether you are at home, at school, or at work. Imagine walking on the street and carrying the only thing you needed in life - the 8cm compact disk with your Live Linux CD. Wouldn't you want to experience such a feeling?

When your computer boots from the LiveCD, the first step is loading the kernel image (vmlinuz). After this, a 4 MB ramdisk is created in the computer's RAM. The rootdisk image (initrd.gz) is then unpacked into it and mounted as a root filesystem. Large directories (like /usr) are mounted directly from the CDROM.

Features

The primary goal of SLAX is to provide a wide collection of useful software while keeping the cd's image small enough to be written to a 185 MB CD-R(W) medium (small 8 cm CD). SLAX boots directly from the CD or USB devices and it provides a full featured Linux operating system

Modularity

With other Live Linux systems, you're stuck with the type and amount of applications the creator decided to include. With SLAX, you can customize the system to fit your needs, by adding additional software in the form of compressed modules. SLAX itself is very useful without any modules, but you can add a lot of own programs to make it even more suitable for your needs.

Speed

Other Live CDs contain all software in a single compressed file. If you run such a Live OS from CD-ROM, the CD drive has to seek back and forth really frequently, because different files are located on different locations of the CD medium. This makes the system notably slow.

With SLAX, all conformable parts of the filesystem are compressed to a standalone file, which doesn't contain anything else. For example, all files which belongs to Xwindow are packed in xwindow.mo, KOffice related stuff is in koffice.mo, etc. If you work with KOffice, you usually need only files from KOffice and nothing else; and hence all files from that part of the filesystem are separated from the rest of it, your CD drive has to seek only in a 10 MB area. This significantly improves the speed.

Other features

SLAX 5 is the most inovative and promissing SLAX ever. It switched to 2.6 kernel line. Zisofs compression was replaced by SquashFS, which provides better compression ratio and higher read speed. Ovlfs (which was the most amazing and exciting feature specific only for SLAX) was replaced by unionFS. And finally, slax-installer GUI was created.

SLAX CD contains

- Linux kernel 2.6 offering excellent hardware support
- the newest ALSA sound drivers
- ndiswrapper for loading Windows drivers for WIFI cards
- madwifi drivers for native support for WIFI cards (Multiband Atheros)
- X11 (xorg) Xwindow system, supporting many gfx cards and wheel mice automatically
- KDE 3.5, an excellent desktop software
- webconfig feature allowing you to save your session data to slax' web

You can get the 6th preview of Slax 6 here.
More info about Slax can you reach from its site.