Thursday, March 26, 2009

IEOR Tools Linux distribution update

I've decided to go along with the project of creating an operating system with a bent toward Operations Research, Industrial Engineering and Management Science. The name of the new Linux operating system will be IEORToolsOS. Not so very original but I wanted the name to be compact and easily remembered. I'm open to new suggestions.

Next I tried to get setup on an Open Source project hosting service. I first tried SourceForge since a lot of good Open Source projects are hosted on that site. They were not willing to comply with my request since a Linux distribution will take up a lot of space. I don't blame them. I probably would have said the same thing. Now I'm trying Google Code. I haven't heard back from them but I'm holding out hope since I know they have huge server farms that can accomodate the space.

The last update is on the development of the IEORToolsOS. I tried creating a custom variant of the Knoppix (homepage) Linux distribution. I used the latest version of Knoppix 6.01 stable. I removed some packages that I thought weren't needed such as gimp. Here are the packages I included

GLPK, OpenOpt, lp-solve, SciPy

I found that I didn't remove enough space because the final size of the project came out to be 1.3GB. I need it to be between 700-800MB to fit on a CD. Still some more work to do on that.

Yet I decided to give it a try and boot it on a PC emulation program called qemu. It did not go so well. I do not think I was able to copy all of the files over correctly. So there is much more work to be done.

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