What is Fedora Scientific?

Fedora Scientific is part of Fedora labs. It is targeted towards new and existing Linux users using Linux for their scientific computing. Such users would include students and researchers whose work involves numerical experiments, preparing their results, writing research reports and presenting them. Fedora Scientific aims to be useful in all phases of the research pipeline.

The advantage of using Fedora Scientific is that you do not have to install the packages which you always need every time you install Linux. They are already available for you when you install Fedora Scientific.

What is included?

Fedora Scientific includes the most popular numerical tools (GNU Octave, Sage, Scilab, and others) and libraries and programming support for for C/C++, Java, Python (including IPython) and R. Plotting tools such as gnuplot and tools for creating graphics such as Inkscape are included. You can also create LaTex documents, including creating presentations using Beamer.

Installation

Installation of Fedora Scientific is not different from installing any other Fedora spin. Download the Fedora Scientific ISO and refer to the Fedora install guide for help with installation.

Here is a walk through video explaining a very basic installation of Fedora Scientific in a virtual machine.

Todo

Installation video tutorial

Customisation

If you are not a fan of KDE, you can install the desktop environment of your choice using Fedora’s package manager. For example, to install the GNOME desktop environment, use the command, sudo yum group install Gnome desktop.