[bioknoppix-discuss] Welcome, and summary of feedback

[Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga]

Hello everyone, thanks for signing up to this mailing list for
bioknoppix. I wanted to assure everyone that a) there really are
developers, b) we've listened to the community requests, and c) we are
working on bringing new and improved bioknoppix releases out soon.

Carlos Rodriguez, build master extraordinare and primary developer of
bioknoppix is in Vancouver Canada for two weeks for a bioinformatics
workshop, so I've been handling publicity and the actual release (he
posted the release announcements, then went home to pack, by the time
the slashdot story came out he was in Canada).

By the way, I'm using the bioknoppix distribution to teach UNIX,
bioinformatics and python programming in a graduate course in
bioinformatics at the University of Puerto Rico, so far, the student's
reaction has been positive, even if UNIX takes a little getting used to.
Our biggest problem is permanent storage of files and connecting to the
Internet on networks that do not have DHCP set up, or that have
winmodems.

First off, we'll be making sure to get jemboss standalone working in the
next release, it's a nice interface to emboss, and it's a shame we
couldn't get it fixed for this first release.

Next, we'll be looking at software to display protein structural data:
one slashdot reader suggested Deep View Swiss PDB Viewer:
http://kr.expasy.org/spdbv/ which we can redistribute without
modifications.

We *might* try building a Mac release, if we can get a live CD
distribution working on a Mac and some hardware to test on.

We'd also like to hear from you, to see what you like and dislike, or
how you think we should change. In particular, we have a couple of
office suites, we thought it was nice to be able to write papers as well
as doing the data analysis, but recognize that other scientific live CDs
like Quantian make room for more science by deleting the Office
applications.

Thanks for trying out bioknoppix!

-- 
Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga
Programmer-Archaeologist
High Performance Computing facility
University of Puerto Rico
http://www.hpcf.upr.edu/~humberto/
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