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Titel: Linux on the Scientific Desktop: Success with Kanotix
 Verfasst am: 22.07.2006, 12:24 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 14. Jun 2005
Beiträge: 7
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Hi!
I found a previous post "Linux on the Corporate Desktop: Success with Kanotix" (at the following address : http://kanotix.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-19560.html) so informative that I thought I should also give my opinion as a scientist and everyday user. I used Kanotix at the laboratory to write a scientific report that included not only text but also figures. For the text part, I used Openoffice which in my opinion has more needed features than its KDE counterpart Koffice (although the Koffice team has done a great job recently). It was also very usefull when I had to prepare a presentation for University, for which I neeeded high compatibility with Powerpoint (although, as I later found out, the computer at University had both Microsoft Office and Openoffice installed!!). But let me get back to the written report. My three favorite tools for designing figures were the Gimp (for image editing), Scribus (page layout) and Inkscape (vector drawing). Each of these tools has its great features along with its annoyances. But thanks to the very active debian community, I could upgrade to the very latest, bleeding edge versions of these softwares. The Gimp had everything I needed for the few image editing I had to perform (although I keep being annoyed by its multi window appearance). I had to upgrade to the unstable branch of Scribus to have a usable tool (with such usefull features as undo). But apart from a few minor annoyances, Scribus allowed me to perform advanced image editing tasks, and the PDF export tool is really great! I was most amazed with Inkscape wich I didn't know previously. It really is very intuitive and has tons of great features, many of which I didn't use at all... I just had some problems with the PDF export wich could not handle gradients properly, but upgrading to the development version solved the problem (not without a few side-effects...). As for the final assembly, I needed a tool that allowed me to merge the text with the figures. I used "PDF-smp" (http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=37321), a KDE sevice menu that allows to split and merge PDFs (among other features). I think this kind of tools should be included in Kanotix (athough it has some heavy dependencies). An alternative tool, KPDFtool can perform the same tasks (generally speaking, compatiblity between different platforms can be attained by producing PDF files, and I believe this is not only the case for scientific purposes). So, in all, using Kanotix was a very positive experience, as I was able to produce a high quality document using open source software. These tools are gaining lots of interesting features with every release that make them a very good alternative to their costly counterparts. I therefore believe that Linux and open source software have a very bright future in the scientific community, and I can see more and more people using softwares such as Openoffice and the Gimp.
I will just end this story by saying that to my opinion, massive switch to Linux boils down to a few details and one such details is internet connection tools. Kanotix, to my opinion, should include Network Manager, which allows painless connection to a network (afer installing Network Manager, I no longer had to type the dhclient command in order to connect to an ethernet cable). Connection to a wireless network could also be enhanced by including the KDE frontend to Network Manager knetworkmanager and making it work with Network Manager (after installing it, it did not seem to recognise my card for obscure reasons) or some usefull softwares such as wireless-assistant and Kwlan. But I believe that things are really heading in the good direction. Thanks for making Linux a geat OS! |
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Titel: Indeed!
Verfasst am: 22.07.2006, 17:52 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 14. Apr 2006
Beiträge: 60
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I, too, use Kanotix for data storage, analysis, and paper writing. It's taken me a long time to get settled into a system which works for me, but I'm very comfortable with things now. I unfortunately am somewhat grandfathered into using Mathematica (very much proprietary and NON-free, but still a great program) for much of my data analysis. However, everything else is done using free software on Kanotix: LyX for document preparation, The GIMP and XFig to make the figures for such documents (or to prettyfy the plots that other programs make), rdiff-backup for the ever-necessary backups and archiving, etc.
Our big workhorse dual-blah-blah-64-bit machine is normally booted into SUSE 10.0, mainly because one of my colleagues is only comfortable using it and refuses to try Kanotix. But some of the programs he (and I) needs depends on some numerical Python things which I have never gotten to work in SUSE (and it's not for lack of trying to find packages, compile from source, etc.). In Kanotix, it Just Works (TM), and that's fabulous. And, of course, the entire ability to boot, detect hardware, and easily update the system is what makes all this possible.
Even my advisor, who has always used Macs except when UNIX or Windows was absolutely necessary for something, and who makes snide remarks about the non-Macs, has moderated, and is appreciative of the ease with which we're now able to do things with Kanotix! |
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