New distro question

[Bill Ricker]

To simplify scientist self-administration of the workstation, consider
WebMin & it's UserMin module. See April Linux Journal review.

>  scientific calculations.

What kind of science?
Bio/Genetic, Geo/Soc/Stat, HPC MPPC ?

If Clustering, / Hi-Performance Computing, that's a whole different
kettle of fish.

BioGenetic: http://www.mybio.net/biowiki/Computational_biology lists several.

Geo: ArchLinux (Archeology), GIS Knoppix, see http://www.opensourcegis.org/

Quantian is Knoppix/Debian Live packaging of lots of scientific
calculation goodness.
[ http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=Quantian  ]

See also "GNU/Linux in Science and Engineering" FAQ at
http://www.comsoc.org/vancouver/scieng.html

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeScienceCD uses AutoPackage to install to any distro
Website has links to many other Linux for Sciences projects too.


>  functional and reasonably supportable.  MIS is familiar with RH stuff,
>  if that matters.

Scientific Linux suits RH-similarity Your MIS should be able to fit
Scientific Linux into their RH BootStrap system.

A number of others might be RH/Centos/Fedora derived, see
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=independence to see who is
based on whom (but hasn't been updated for Ubuntu variants yet?).

Or just use the Gnome Science CD with MIS's RH desktop ?

If you want Ubuntu cool-ness, Scibuntu is the Ubu answer to Science
Linux (from the RH/Fedora camp).

-- 
Bill
n1vux at arrl.net bill.n1vux at gmail.com