Free university software for linux

Boston University Linux is based on Fedora Core Linux, but specifically tailored for the BU environment.

Weve added security updates, made modifications to make software work better with the way things are set up here, and added some applications that we think you might like to have.

The server edition of BU Linux provides a modern, stable, and robust server platform suitable for long-term deployment in many roles throughout the university.

Supported Hardware

Currently, only i686-class machines are supported. This includes almost everything from Intels Pentium Pro on. AMD64 and Intel EM64T systems will work fine using their 32-bit mode. Watch for a 64-bit version later this summer.

Specific Notes on Server Applications

Mail Server:

BU Linux 4.5 Server Edition (Zodiac) includes three different choices of Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) for your mail server. Each of these open source servers has its unique strengths, and you can install one or more and use the utility system-switch-mail to choose which is active.

The default is IBMs Postfix, which is designed from scratch to be secure and easily configurable. On a newly-installed BU Linux machine, Postfix is configured to exchange mail on the local machine and to send mail out to other systems, but not receive mail from the network. For this reason, outgoing mail from global BU accounts (those matching valid BU login names and with the proper UID) will appear to come from @bu.edu rather than @hostname.bu.edu. Local users (including system accounts) will retain the hostname, but without reconfiguration, any replies will bounce. Changing the system to accept mail is easy; see the BU Linux web site for details.

For the maximum flexibility and for compatibility with existing configurations (and with existing expertise), we also include the traditional standard Sendmail. And, if you have particular special needs, you may find that the new Exim MTA fits your situation best.

No matter which MTA you choose, please contact us if you need any assistance. With so many options available, the situation can be confusing, and its unfortunately easy for an accidentally misconfigured system to become a target for spam relayers. We have significant expertise at configuring both Postfix and Sendmail in a variety of situations, and will be glad to help.

FTP Server:

This release of BU Linux provides two options for FTP. The first is vsftpd, which is designed to be simple and secure. This is the most appropriate for almost all situations, but if you require more power and flexibility, we also include ProFTPd, which has many more options and a configuration syntax similar to that of the Apache web server.

Please also remember that FTP is an insecure protocol and that any passwords used travel over the network in plain text. For this reason, its best to avoid anything but anonymous FTP. For user-authenticated file transfer, use SSH and SFTP. (SFTP is provided by the OpenSSH server and enabled by default.)

Web Server:

The web server software included in BU Linux is the industry-standard Apache httpd. We also include PHP 4.3 and many other useful tools for building a web server.
If you need to provide authenticated access to web services to BU users, please contact us and we will provide you with our University-standard Weblogin module. This provides a powerful and flexible means of single-signon access control for the BU user community and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to provide this for your users.

Database Server:

BU Linux includes MySQL 4.1 and PostgreSQL 7.4. For less demanding SQL applications, we also provide SQLite 3, which provides simple SQL databases without the management overhead of running a SQL server.

Alan project is a Turing machine implementation.

Alan is an implementation of a Turing machine for educational purposes.

It was created as a programing project at the University of Aplied Sciences Rosenheim.

Features include an easy-to-use GUI and a reusable Turing Machine component. Additionally, Alan contains many example programs for the Turing machine.

BlueJ project is an integrated Java environment (Java IDE) specifically designed for introductory teaching.
The BlueJ environment was developed as part of a university research project about teaching object-orientation to beginners. The system is being developed and maintained by a joint research group at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, and the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. The project is supported by Sun Microsystems.
The aim of BlueJ is to provide an easy-to-use teaching environment for the Java language that facilitates the teaching of Java to first year students. Special emphasis has been placed on visualisation and interaction techniques to create a highly interactive environment that encourages experimentation and exploration.
BlueJ is based on the Blue system. Blue is an integrated teaching environment and language, developed at the University of Sydney and Monash University, Australia. BlueJ provides a Blue-like environment for the Java language.
The BlueJ project started at Monash University in Melbourne, and later split and migrated to its current locations.
BlueJ is implemented in Java, and regularly being tested on Solaris, Linux, Macintosh, and various Windows versions. It should run on all platforms supporting a recent Java virtual machine.
Main features:
- fully integrated environment
- graphical class structure display
- graphical and textual editing
- built-in editor, compiler, virtual machine, debugger, etc.
- easy-to-use interface, ideal for beginners
- interactive object creation
- interactive object calls
- interactive testing
- incremental application development

Algorithm::Cluster is a Perl interface to the C Clustering Library.

This module is an interface to the C Clustering Library, a general purpose library implementing functions for hierarchical clustering (pairwise simple, complete, average, and centroid linkage), along with k-means and k-medians clustering, and 2D self-organizing maps.

This library was developed at the Human Genome Center of the University of Tokyo. The C Clustering Library is distributed along with Cluster 3.0, an enhanced version of the famous Cluster program originally written by Michael Eisen while at Stanford University.

NetCalendar is a network capable and mostly UNIX /usr/bin/calendar database compatible Calendar application programmed in Java.

NetCalendars initial motivaion was a programming project at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences for the object oriented programming class. But it became much more than just that!

phpCAS is a PHP client library for CAS (Central Authentication Service).
phpCAS is a simple interface to ITS Central Authentication Service for PHP web applications.
phpCAS is written by Pascal Aubry (University of Rennes 1) from previous work done by Julien Marchal and Vincent Mathieu (both at University of Nancy 2) under the scope of the ESUP Portail group.
Main features:
- `simple CAS clients and CAS proxies supported
- browser or CAS proxy access
- sessioning between CAS proxies and services
- non blocking authentication checking
Customization:
- look and feel of all output pages
- Internationalization (english and french, looking for translators...)
- PGT storage to file or database for CAS proxies

JVOIPLIB is an object-oriented Voice over IP (VoIP) library written in C++.
It is based upon work done for my thesis at the School for Knowledge Technology (or School voor Kennistechnologie in Dutch), a cooperation between the Hasselt University and the Maastricht University.
A part of this library was developed at the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (EDM) in Diepenbeek, Belgium. The EDM is a research institute of the Hasselt University.
Main features:
- Easy VoIP session creation and destruction.
- Highly configurable sessions: sampling rate, sample interval, compression type, ... can all be selected by the user. These features can also be changed during a session.
- Openness and extensibility: the object-oriented nature of the library makes it very easy to add features; new components can easily be tested by registering them as User Defined modules.
- Support for 3D effects: for my thesis I also did some research and development about VoIP in networked virtual environments, which included adding 3D effects to sound. For this reason, Ive added this feature to the library.