Free university of washington 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.

There is quite a bit of history on this item. One of the assignments in a computer graphics course at the University of Victoria was to rotate a number of Bezier curves around an axis and display the result in 3D using a single light source.

This was on Sun Sparcs using X. Since then the program has mutated to match my platform preference at a given time (DOS, Windows, Linux).

The latest mutation has been to SDL/OpenGL and the result runs happily on Linux and Windows. Screenshot junkies might find the following of interest:

Systems of Ordinary Differential Equations RubySode (Sode.rb) is a Ruby program to generate a Ruby program to solve a single (or a system of) ordinary differential equation(s). A long Taylor series method, pioneered by Prof. Y.F. Chang, who taught at the University of Nebraska in the late 1970s when I was a graduate student there, is used.
The number of Taylor series terms can be specified in the problem file, though it is usually 30.
Enhancements:
- Minir code cleanup. Some tests have been made more meaningful (add, sub, mult, and div).

Coursor project is a Web application for academic environments.
Coursor is a Web-based academic course system for assigning students to university courses.
It has an evolutionary algorithm for assigning students to the courses they requested. This algorithm tries to find an optimal distribution of students to existing courses while taking their preferences into account.
The system supports multiple roles for users: Admin, Student, Teacher/Prof, or Tutor.
A user can also have multiple roles.
It supports international localization, currently in English, German, French, Russian, and Arabic
Main features:
- Browser independent usage for students, teachers and admins alike (no frames, no necessary JavaScript, no cookies).
- Platform independent (entirely written in JAVA).
- Runs on APACHE Tomcat and uses a Postgresql Database.
- Evolutionary Algorithm to assign students to courses.
- Multiple Roles: Administrator, Teacher/Prof, Tutor and Student. One person can have multiple roles.
Enhancements:
- Encoding for Russian fixed
- PropertyEditor (propEdit.sf.net) programmed, will be released as own package. Eases Tranlation a lot.
- I18N target in build.xml starts PropertyEditor
- Serializable classes with ID (Eclipse wanted that)

The Program Database Toolkit (PDT) is a powerful tool infrastructure that provides access to the high-level interface of source code for analysis tools and applications.
Many tasks in an integrated programming environment require access to program information for their implementation. Program Database Toolkit (PDT) is a framework for analyzing source code written in several programming languages and for making rich program knowledge accessible to developers of static and dynamic analysis tools.
PDT implements a standard program representation, the program database (PDB), that can be accessed in a uniform way through a class library supporting common PDB operations. Software tools can use this library to accomplish tasks such as
- documentation of program components
- creation of graphic program browsers that show class hierarchies, function call graphs, and template instantiations
- insertion of instrumentation for performance profiling and tracing; andgeneration of interface details for calling library routines or buildinginterlanguage bindings.
Enhancements:
- Assorted minor bugfixes.

owl is a program to display electronic dictionaries. It uses the extensive markup language dicML.
Two dictionaries are currently available with this program: a huge English/German dictionary originally published by Technical University of Chemnitz, and a French/German dictionary written from scratch for dicML and therefore not as big as the first one.
Main features:
- support of the whole dicML standard
- available for all important operating systems
- user interface in English, German and French
- possibility to print
- for free and open source

The NSCL Data Acquisition system is a general purpose nuclear physics data acquisition system for small to medium scale nuclear physics experiments.
NSCL Data Acquisition System can be combined with NSCL SpecTcl to form a powerful online/offline data handling system. It is in use at several university labs and, of course, the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University.
Whats New in 8.1-pre4 Development Release:
- The way the experimental files work has been reorganized.
- Issues in controplush have been fixed.
- More hardware support has been added (preliminary VM-USB support).
Whats New in 8.0-01 Stable Release:
- Make event files readonly as they get finalized.
- Make ~stagearea/complete write protected except when it has to be.
- Fix up 2.6 build so that lib and include get installed... and can be cleaned.
- Fix a bunch of stuff with the 2.6 build that arises on make dist and building from the tarball. (mostly copying stuff from the 8.1 build files.
- Make sure the right compilers link the readout skels.
- Adjust the framework makefile so that template class implementations will get installed in the include directory to allow them to be used in application software.
- Ensure the SBS driver is identical to the 2.6 version of the drive in the 8.1 branch.

Tigerbooks project is a online book exchange.

Tigerbooks is an online book exchange designed for individual universities and colleges.

Students can post books for sale or browse for books to buy. Fulltext and ISBN searches are available.

There are other book exchange systems currently available. However, TigerBooks is an open source solution.

This means that it is freely available to any University or College that wishes to use it for its own students. Furthermore, any University or College can make contributions to the TigerBooks thus distributing its maintenance costs.

Maintenance costs are particularly important in academic realms as students are only at their institutions for the duration of their program. Being an open source solution means the Universities and Colleges do not have to worry about who will be maintaining TigerBooks in the years to come.


TigerBooks is a successful open source project and will see greater success in the future as it is distributed amongst Universities and Colleges. It is successful really for two reasons.

The first being that is meets the needs of students in exchanging their textbooks. The second is that it is open source and consequently is maintained by the open source community.