Free workstation software for linux

Black Orion Network is an update and system management platform for among others Black Orions redhat-compatible Enterprise Linux Distributions. Black Orion Enterprise Linux software distributions are offered to you by the open source community as free software.

A program is free software if users are free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission. Please feel free to make and redistribute as many copies of Black Orion Enterprise Linux as you like.

How It Works:

1. Obtain Black Orion Enterprise Linux

Obtain one of Black Orions redhat-compatible Enterprise Linux Distributions from the downloads section.

2. Burn cd images

Burn the downloaded iso images on to a cd.

3. Register yourself as a Black Orion Network Member

Register yourself as a member in the Black Orion Network section.

4. Install Black Orion on a computer

Read the manuals for the various installation options. The system can also be installed as a rhel4 virtual machine.

5. Connect your system to the Black Orion Network

Connect your system to the Black Orion Network with the up2date client installed on your system. You can find up2date by right-clicking the Black Orion Network Alert Icon on your desktop. Connect your system with your member name and password (see 3).

CrystalAudio is a FVWM-Crystal configuration tuned for use on an audio workstation. It has many new applications for the menu, including many sound-related applications and improved sound controls. The project launches qjackctl at startup.
The final goal of the project is to make the FVWM-Crystal menu compatible with the freedesktop specification and to provide some tools to generate the menu entries and icons from desktop and icon files provided by the applications in the system.
Enhancements:
- generate-fvwm-crystal-menu work with both new and old type application desktop files, so it is time for the 2.0 version.
- A lot of debugging have been done on that script: See the ChangeLog for the details.
- Added support for stalonetray in all the recipes.

OpenKiosk is an open-source multi-platform kiosk system designed for use in libraries, offices, schools, internet cafes, airports, conference rooms, and more!

Openkiosk aims to be one of the best kiosk software available in the open-souce community. The following prototype screenshots of the OpenKiosk client reflects its evolution towards the goal of acheiving simplicity and elegance in kiosk terminals.

OpenKiosk, is a system made up of a collection of programs that work together in a local network of inter-connected computers. It is a centralized management software for kiosks. It assumes that the resources are shared and centralized as well, including the Internet connection. This implies that the shared Internet connection to the outside world is assumed to be always on at some point within the local network, perhaps a NAT server. It is up to the client program to automatically limit customers individually from accessing the Internet.

When a customer walks in and uses a kiosk or a workstation, the client program obtains his/her login/user account information. It then sends this login information to the server, which in turn, verifies this data and if valid, returns the access rights and duration of use for the customer back to the client program.

The client program at this point, handles the restrictions transparently including preventing running new programs and making it appear that the Internet connection is down if the time limit is reached or if the administrator manually stopped a customer from continuing to use a kiosk/workstation.

OpenKiosk is primarily designed with the multi-user network in mind. From a library containing 20 public browsing terminals to a large internet cafe or convention center containing hundreds to thousands of kiosks or workstations, OpenKiosk is built with components that are designed to scale up. It is not meant to be used on a single stand-alone computer

The Openkiosk system is basically composed of two parts. The first program is called NodeView. It acts as the OpenKiosk central server containing the client information database. It is responsible for administering all the clients on the network either automatically or manually. Monitoring and controlling the workstations can be done locally via the graphical user interfaces or remotely from a Java Applet in a browser.

The second part is simply called "The Client". It is the actual program that sits between the customer and the operating system interface on the workstations. It is the software which physically limits the users access to the Internet, network resources, the local programs on the workstation itself.

For automatic usage, it can take in membership card login. It is also possible to interface to much more advanced hardware readers such as smart card readers. The client is also capable of simple but important tasks such as remote shutdown, instant messaging, file updates and much more.

Presently, there are two versions of clients. The X11 Linux/Unix version, which is an applet that sits on top of the KDE panel (requires at least KDE 3.X) and the Windows version (Windows 95,98,NT,2000,XP).

Quantian distribution is a remastering of Knoppix, the self-configuring and directly bootable dvd/cdrom that turns any pc or laptop (provided it can boot from cdrom/dvd) into a full-featured Linux workstation.
Recent versions of Quantian are based on clusterKnoppix and add support for openMosix, including remote booting of light clients in an openMosix terminal server context. Earlier releases are still available; see below for URLs for downloads as well as ordering information.
Brief introductory information is available in a paper (from June 2004) submitted to The Political Methodologist, slides from the presentation at Usenix 2004 (July 2004), and in the earlier (revised) paper about Quantian that has appeared in the DSC 2003 Proceedings.
Quantian is an extension of Knoppix and clusterKnoppix from which it takes its base system of around two gigabytes of software, along with fully automatic hardware detection and configuration.
Enhancements:
- Kernel 2.6.12, KDE 3.5 / 3.4, OpenOffice 2.0, ... and more from Knoppix 4.0.2
- a backport of the openMosix-enabled 2.4.27 kernel and openMosix tools from the last clusterKnoppix release,
- very comprehensive support for GNU R with over 870 packages from CRAN and BioConductor, plus ESS, Ggobi, Rpad, RKward, RSPerl, JGR, ...
- addition of the Java 1.5.0 SDK enabling us to add ImageJ, Weka, JGR, Mondrian;
- plus a number of other new packages (inkscape, orsa, praat, wxmaxima, some more Debian documentation...)
- and still loads more of math, bio, engineering, LaTeX, ... software

StartCom Linux is based on the Red Hat AS source code.
Specially designed for the demanding home user, the MultiMedia Edition lets you easily communicate with your friends and family members over the Internet, browse the news or watching the latest DVD movie you just bought.
Listen to your loved Music while you check your email or play some funny game while you burn a CD, everything is easily accessible from your desktop by a click on your mouse button.
System configuration and adjustments of your preferences never have been so simple, thanks to the integrated configuration tools.
Enhancements:
- StartCom has released its new Multimedia Edition, ML-5.0.5, code named Kessem. Its probably one of the largest and most complete Linux distributions ever released to the public. Release ML-5.0.5, offers many out-of-the-box capabilities, never bundled with an operating system before. Designed as a multimedia workstation with music studio and advanced video editing applications, it also provides the desktop user with the most applications for day to day use.

Phrealon is a bootable linux CD based on Slackware Linux 8.0 (now 9.0)designed to allow the easy imaging of multiple workstations.

It utilizes the udpcast set of Linux tools to accomplish this.