Fedora Scientific: Open Source Scientific Computing

Fedora Scientific Spin is a Fedora Linux spin that aims to showcase the open source tools for scientific and numerical computing. It was first released officially with Fedora 16 in November 2011, and is targeted at current and future Linux users in the domain of scientific computing.

Applications in Fedora Scientific

The current set of applications shipped in Fedora Scientific are broadly classified into the following categories:

• Scientific computing tools and environments: The numerical computing package GNU Octave, the computer algebra system Maxima, with its front-end wxMaxima, the Python scientific libraries SciPy, NumPy and Spyder (a Python environment for scientific computing) are some of the software included in this category. A development environment for R, the statistical computing environment, is also included, and so are the ROOT tools for analysing large amounts of data.
• Generic programming and development tools and libraries: Software in this category includes the GNU C/C++ and FORTRAN compilers, the OpenJDK Java development tools, and the IDEs NetBeans and Eclipse. Also included are autotools, flex, bison, ddd and valgrind.
• Parallel and distributed programming tools/libraries: Software tools and libraries included in this category include the popular parallel programming libraries OpenMPI, PVM, and the shared-memory programming library OpenMP. Also included is the Torque resource manager to enable you to set up a batch-processing system.
• Editing, drawing and visualisation tools: So you have simulated your grand experiments, and need to visualise the data, plot graphs, and create publication-quality articles and figures. The tools included to help you in this include LaTex compilers and the Texmaker and Kile editors, plotting and visualisation tools Gnuplot, xfig, MayaVi, Dia and Ggobi , and the vector graphics tool Inkscape.
• Version control, backup tools and document managers: Version control and backup tools are included to help you manage your data and documents better — Subversion, Git and Mercurial are available, along with the backup tool backintime. Also included is a bibliography manager, BibTool.

Besides these four main categories, some of the other miscellaneous utilities include: hevea (the awesome LaTex-to-HTML converter), GNU Screen and IPython. You can find the complete list of all the additional packages included in the spin here.