Thanks to "Tarun Kant" tarunkant@linuxmail.org and the SunnyLUG from Jodhpur for this useful piece of information

For people who are into life science research / bioinformatics, there are a few good linux distros available. I will be trying these out in the coming days and will keep posting my experiences. These are:

1. DNALinux DNALinux is a is a SLAX-based Linux distribution with bioinformatics software pre-installed. DNA and protein sequence manipulation software is included. Like EMBOSS, Primer3, ClustalW, T-Coffe and others. Website: http://www.dnalinux.com/

2. BioBrew Linux BioBrew Linux is an open source Linux distribution based on the NPACI Rocks (www.rocksclusters.org) cluster software and enhanced for bioinformaticists and life scientists. While it looks, feels, and operates like ordinary Red Hat Linux, BioBrew Linux includes popular cluster software e.g. MPICH, LAM-MPI, PVM, Modules, PVFS, Myrinet GM, Sun Grid Engine, gcc, Ganglia, and Globus, *and* popular bioinformatics software e.g. the NCBI toolkit, BLAST, mpiBLAST, HMMER, ClustalW, GROMACS, PHYLIP, WISE, FASTA, and EMBOSS. It runs on everything from notebook computers to large clusters. Website: http://bioinformatics.org/biobrew/

3. Bio-Linux Bio-Linux provides both standard and cutting edge bioinformatics tools on a Linux base. It is powerful, configurable and easy to maintain. Bio-Linux has been customised for ease of use and provides an ideal system for scientists handling and analysing biological data. Bio-Linux also comes with many development tools, providing a solid base for bioinformatics software development. It can also be easily deployed as a computer cluster. As of version 4.0, Bio-Linux is based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Bioinformatics-related customisations include the inclusion of a large number of bioinformatics programs and programming libraries, the addition of graphical menus for much of the bioinformatics software, and links from the desktop to key documentation and applications. The system also includes a comprehensive, categorised and searchable documentation system for bioinformatics software.

4. Bioknoppix The University of Puerto Rico High Performance Computing facility (HPCf) and the Puerto Rico Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN-PR) have release Bioknoppix. Bioknoppix is a live CD linux, based on KNOPPIX, and specialized to include tools for bioinformatics. Bioknoppix does not need to be installed on your computer, making it a perfect tool for workshops and demos. Some of the software included in the 0.3 release are EMBOSS 2.8.0, jemboss, artemis, clustal, Cn3D, ImageJ, BioPython, Rasmol, Bioperl, Bioconductor Website: http://bioknoppix.hpcf.upr.edu/

5. Biolinux-BR BioLinux-BR is a project directed to the scientific community. The intention is to create a Linux distribution for people with little familiarity with the installation of the operational system and mainly for people that do not know how they must proceed to unpack a program, compile and install it correctly. For these reasons, this is a Linux system that aims to be easy to use and still offering packages that will be part of the BioLinux-BR. Website: http://glu.df.ibilce.unesp.br/

6. Vlinux VLinux Bioinformatics workbench is a Linux distribution for Bioinformatics. It is easy to use, no installation required, CD-based distribution based on Knoppix 3.3. It includes a variety of sequence and structure analysis packages.It is an Open source product released under the GNU GPL License. Website: http://bioinformatics.org/vlinux/index.html

7. Vigyaancd VigyaanCD is a live Linux CD containing all the required software to boot the computer with ready to use modeling software. VigyaanCD v0.1 is also based on KNOPPIX v3.3. It contains programs for bioinformatics, computational biology and computational chemistry. It also has genomes from Eschercia coli (K 12) and Synechococcus sp. WH 8102 It is suitable both for beginners (12 demos and tutorials) and experts. ISO image size (v 0.1) is 647 MB.

And let me tell you this is an effort by an Indian. Kudos to you Pratul K. Agarwal for such a nice package. In fact I just downloaded the CD and have casually tried it. Looks superb. It has the option for a persistant home directory on HDD, which is very essential for Live CDs. Every thing is very comprehensively arranged. Once again. Three chers for Pratul.

Cheers -Tarun

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