Quantian is an extension of Knoppix and clusterKnoppix from which it takes its base system of around gigabytes of software, along with fully automatic hardware detection and configuration. To this, it adds about five gigabytes of software.

What does Quantian contain?

Quantian differs from Knoppix by adding a large number of programs of interest to applied or theoretical workers in quantitative or data-driven fields. The added quantitative, numerical or scientific programs comprise:

• R, including essentially all packages from CRAN (excluding only non-Unix packages such as MimR, or ROracle which needs special headers and libraries) and BioConductor; the snapshot was made February 25, 2006) as well as some from other R package repositories, out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs, the Ggobi visualisation program, the Rpad interactive web interface and initial support for the RKward gui for R.
• bioinformatics tools such all packages from the BioConductor project, as well as bioperl, biopython and applications such as blast2, clustalw, and hmmer;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, matwrap and Inline::Octave as well as other matrix language environments;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima (including the X11 front-end and emacs support), Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC, YaCaS, Axiom, Mathomatic and Calc;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• the Grass geographic information system;
• the OpenDX and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• TeXmacs for wysiwyg scientific editing as well as LyX and kile for wysiwyg (La)TeX editing;
• various Python modules including Scientific and Numeric Python;
• Cernlib, a large number of programs and libraries from the CERN particle physic lab;
• the bochs, wine and qemu emulators;
• office suites such as OpenOffice.org and KOffice as well as Abiword, Gnumeric and the Gimp;
• and various other programs such as apcalc, aplus, aribas, autoclass, DrGeo, euler, evolver, freefem, ftnchek, gambit, geg, geomview, ghemical, glpk, gnuplot, gperiodic, gri, gmt, gretl, ImageMagick, IPE, lam, lp-solve, mcl, mpich, mpqc, multimix, rasmol, plotutils, pgapack, pspp, pdl, rcalc, SQLite, Tclsh, yorick, xaos, and xppaut;

At the same time, all the distinguishing features that set Knoppix apart are retained in Quantian:

• Auto-configuration of graphics, sound, disks, networking, auxiliary devices which is second to none among computer installations
• A recent version (actually mostly 3.5 with some 3.4) of the KDE desktop environment
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers including gcj
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus other languages such ruby, tcl, Lua...
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as kate, jed, joe, nedit and zile
• Gnumeric, Koffice, ... office tools, with OpenOffice.org added back in
• A Swiss-army knife collection of networking tools allowing access to wired and wireless lans, covering ethernet, isdn or dial-up modems
• And still in Quantian though no longer in Knoppix: a complete teTeX TeX / LaTeX setup for scientific publishing along with wysiwyg frontends such as kile and LyX / LyX-Qt, the preview mode for emacs editors, several additonal bibtex tools, and other goodies such as prosper, pdfscreen and beamer for presentations as well as numerous Bibtex utilities.

Last but not least, and thanks to clusterKnoppix, Quantian allows you to build openMosix clusters in a matter of minutes -- and to immediately use them thanks to the 5 gb of added scientific software.