Empowering African scientists - an investigation into a CD-based installer for scubuntu

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) is software for which the source code is made available and can be freely modified and redistributed. OSS has been identified in the South African national R&D strategy as a vehicle for fostering local innovation and economic development. It promotes inclusivity by being freely available and allowing unconstrained customisation and modification. The use of OSS for scientific computing can significantly lower the barriers-to-entry for poorly funded research institutions in developing countries. At the same time, it can empower scientists to contribute and collaborate with their peers globally. Linux is an open source operating system. There are scientific tools that run on Linux for almost all scientific disciplines. While there are successful scientific Linux-based projects like SciLab (SciLab 2008), MATLAB (Matlab 2008), and the R programming language for statistics (R 2008),and despite its significant advantages, scientific computing on Linux is not as widespread as it could be. To address this problem, the Meraka Institute is developing scubuntu, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution for scientists. The project vision is that scubuntu will become the premier choice of desktop operating system for researchers and scientists. A number of challenges are associated with scientific computing on Linux. The scubuntu project seeks to address these problems. One of the major challenges is that scientific software is not installed by default in any Linux distribution. For most scientists, it is difficult to select, install and maintain appropriate scientific software on Linux. These tasks require knowledge of the OSS applications that are available as well as technical proficiency on Linux. This can be time consuming, and the results are usually not shared, so effort is unnecessarily duplicated. The scubuntu project seeks to address these problems by making scientific packages part of the default distribution and providing tools to ease their discovery, installation and management. One of the key activities in scubuntu is the determination of profiles of scientists, based on their computing and software requirements. These profiles are coupled with a specification identifying the OSS scientific tools that are most appropriate for that profile. The refinement of these profiles and package collections is an ongoing activity that will be driven by the scubuntu user community. Investigative work was undertaken to determine the suitability of a CD-based installation program for scubuntu. An experimental prototype of such an installer was developed, based on the standard Ubuntu installer. This prototype installer allows users to select and install scientific software based on their field of study or profile. The work done to develop this prototype is presented here