Feature changed by: Hubert Stassen (drgullit) Feature #309007, revision 7 Title: Add more scientific packages Package Wishlist: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Ricardo Gabriel Berlasso (rgbsuse) Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: Right now, openSUSE have quite few "scientific packages". We have freemat on Education, xmgrace ... and a few more. But, for example, octave is only on Packman and SciDAVis is nowhere (for 11.2 at least). There are no packages for Scilab either, nor for PAW... Use Case: A physicist (or engineer) working on University that needs a good Linux distro for his/her work. Nowadays, even if openSUSE is more stable and reliable than fedora, the scientist will choose the later because its larger set of scientific packages. Business case (Partner benefit): openSUSE.org: To give openSUSE more presence on universities and research centers at "final user" level. Now openSUSE and its derivatives are found in clusters to run simulations (I've seen some of them) with ad-hoc programs, or in supercomputers, but not in the office computer for the single researcher. With its focus on stability, openSUSE could be the perfect "sci distro" but the few "heavy duty" scientific packages available is against this. Discussion: #1: Luis Medinas (lmedinas) (2010-02-14 21:52:25) Octave is on Contrib that is my usecase but still i prefer to use Matlab instead. #2: Jones de Andrade (johannesrs) (2010-02-15 13:06:33) That's absolutelly a MUST one! We heavilly use openSuse at my University for Scientific Applications. On the other hand, unfortunatelly there is a lot of packages that are not available, or "poorly available" (explain later) in the repositories concerning that. At the moment, we use from 11.2 the following packages (everywhere in the repositories): ChemTool, Xdrawchem, Avogadro, Ghemical, Labplot, g3data, bkchem, wxmaxima, maxima, octave, qtoctave, gelemental, gabedit and kalzium. Programs we use that are unavailable at the repositories (easy installation/compilation thow): molden, gopenmol, maui, webmo (formely webmol) and molekel. Programs we used to use but don't use anymore because they are too hard to compile and unavailable in the repos: SciDavis and qtiplot. Programs poorly avialable: openmpi, mpich: They are available, but they are not easily usable. I say that because me and coleagues had a hard time in the past trying to link programas with the version of those libraries that come with opensuse, because it seemed to be too scatered around. We ended up installing them from the producers in well known directories, and no problems anymore. fftw: same problem as above, solved in the very same way. gromacs: the compilation provided is ok, but... no mpi, no double + single precision executables? I would suggest two new packages: gromacs- omp and gromacs-mpich. torque: choosen the same approach since it's of critical use. Not sure if it douldn't be simply installed, thow. atiplot: already mentioned before, but in reality the package avialble for opensuse 11.2 in a repo is a joke. It has the whole qtiplot, *except*... the executables! :p Programs that I do not know if they can be provided: gamess-us, firefly, nwchem, namd, vmd, lammps, autodock, autodock-tools, amber- tools, (all available for free, but need subscription to download most of them, and none is gpl). As you can see, I'm clearly chemistry (and cluster) biased. I'm certain that other fields of research would easilly have other suggestions! And I probably missed something! Seem that there is a LOT of room for improvement here! ;) Don't get me wrong, openSuse is already MARVOLOUS, including for scientific applications... But there is a lot of things here that can be improved. ;) + #3: Hubert Stassen (drgullit) (2010-02-18 14:51:18) (reply to #2) + johannesrs presented a very nice wishlist ... That would be an almost + complete software repositiry for the computational + chemistry/biology/physics communities. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/309007