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.

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.

TigerEvents is a novel, Web-based event announcement system for promoting upcoming and ongoing events to large communities such as university campuses, companies, or the general public.
Enhancements:
- This release has several bugfixes and enhancements.
- New to this release is the exporting of several calendar formats, including iCal, hCal, and being able to import events into Google Calendar.

sinntp is a tiny NNTP client. sinntp virtually lacks any user interface: news messages are downloaded from a remote server and put into a local mailbox file.
About NNTP:
The Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP is an Internet application protocol used primarily for reading and posting Usenet articles, as well as transferring news among news servers. Brian Kantor of the University of California, San Diego and Phil Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley completed RFC 977, the specification for the Network News Transfer Protocol, in March 1986. Other contributors included Stan Barber from the Baylor College of Medicine and Erik Fair of Apple Computer.
Usenet was originally designed around the UUCP network, with most article transfers taking place over direct computer-to-computer telephone links. Readers and posters would log into the same computers that hosted the servers, reading the articles directly from the local disk.
As local area networks and the Internet became more commonly used, it became desirable to allow newsreaders to be run on personal computers, and a means of employing the Internet to handle article transfers was desired. Because networked Internet-compatible filesystems were not yet widely available, it was decided to develop a new protocol that resembled SMTP, but was tailored for reading newsgroups.
The well-known TCP port 119 is reserved for NNTP. When clients connect to a news server with SSL, TCP port 563 is used. This is sometimes referred to as NNTPS.
The protocol remains in widespread use, and as of 2005 efforts are underway to produce an updated standard. The IMAP protocol can also be used for reading newsgroups.
Enhancements:
- Reading messages is not stopped if reading a message failed.

Chemicalinventory is a web application that manage the chemical stock in a laboratory-, production- or other facilities, where chemicals must be safely stored, easily found and tracked. chemicalInventory solution is currently productive at The Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Main features:
- Search facility, with textual, structure and substructure search.
- Check in and out of containers.
- Multi-level location management.
- Label print with container information.
- Administration module for all data.
- History tracking of essential data.
- Report generation - on screen and paper.
- Sample Module - track analytical data.
- Share data cross organisation.
- Batch module. Link samples in batches/projects.
- Link to external ressources, msds
- ... and lots more..
Chemicalinventory is an open source project. The application is free*. Specific components of this application is licenced by third parties, and may require separate licence.

Houdinix is a GNU/Linux live-cd made for young computer science students of our university, its a simple and user-friendly distribution, containing all tools needed by a beginner.
It contains more than 2 gigabytes of data (on a single 700Mb CD), and can be installed very easily on a local hard drive with our installer, Houdinstall.
Main features:
- Kernel 2.4.24houdinix.
- Compressed file system Squashfs: 2.4Gb of data.
- KDE 3.2 graphic environment.
- Compilers and interpreters for the followings languages : Basic, C, C++, Caml (ocaml), Cobol, Delphi, Fortran, Guile, Java (JDK1.4.2), Lisp (GNU clisp), Pascal, Perl (modules Gtk, Tk, Mail, ...), Prolog (gplc, gprolog), Python, Scheme (umb-scheme), Smalltalk, Tcl.
- Scientific tools : gnuplot, scilab, mupad.
- OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, Gimp 2
- Network support and tools : telnet, ssh, nmap, nslookup, etc...
- Internet tools : Firefox, Thunderbird, Kmail, Kopete, Konqueror, etc...
- File systems recognized on local disks: ext2, ext3, vfat, iso9660 (ro), squashfs (ro), jfs, minix, ufs, reiserfs, ntfs (ro).
- Installation on hard disk with Houdinstall.
- Swap detection with our software Houdiswap.

libgist provides a generalized search tree C++ library.
This directory contains the 2.0 release of the GiST C++ library. Please refer
to our WWW home page located at for updates on documentation and new releases.
libGiST is not public domain software. It is copyrighted by the University of California but may be used according to the licensing terms of the the copyright below.
Enhancements:
- Updates to a semi-fork of libgist 2.0.1tmp
- Now compiles OK with gcc 4+.