Boston University Linux

The BU Linux 5.3 release has been installed  automatically and transparently on all BU Linux 5.X machines that have enabled  'autoupdate'.  Machines are now running the equivalent of Red Hat Enterprise 5.3, the latest stable RHEL release!

The new installer is available as an ftp download or you can pick up a copy of the media from the Front Office of Information Services & Technology.  Now that the new installer is released, any new installation or installer update to Monde will require it; the old installer will no longer work.

Previously, we had announced that Zodiac and Monde would be maintained until 2010.  This was based on Red Hat's statement that they would maintain RHEL4 and RHEL5 that long.  Since then, Red Hat has announced that they are extending support for RHEL5 past 2010.  This allows us to extend support of Monde.

The RHEL4 distro will still be end-of-life'd in 2010 and Zodiac will be obsoleted at that time.  We would like to point out the Monde is a fine and stable distribution and it can be used on server systems.  We encourage our user community to upgrade to Monde as soon as they can and consider installing Monde directly for any new systems.

BU Linux 5.3 release includes the statistics application R, along with many popular R packages. R is a complete open source replacement to the proprietary S-Plus statistical package. And, if you're currently using a spreadsheet for numerical analysis, you may find R to be a more powerful and more reliable choice.

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.

— The R FAQ, Hornik (2005) ISBN 3-900051-08-9

The base number of packages for BU Linux is over 1200, the number that are specifically modified for the BU environment is over 500. (Note: this number includes packages requested by users ported from Fedora distributions.)  Each major update contains about 300 updated packages from CentOS and of these, about 50 need to be updated for BU modifications.

BU Linux 5 (Monde) is based on the CentOS 5 distribution (which is itself based on Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition 5 (RHEL 5)).  About every six months, Red Hat releases on major update to RHEL 5 which includes security and bug fixes along with some new features.  CentOS takes the Red Hat source code and compiles it as the basis for a similar CentOS 5 update.  When this is released, we take that and port any BU modified packages to the distribution, and release an upgraded BU Linux version to the BU community via AFS and FTP.
 

BU Linux 4.5 Server Edition (Zodiac) is now available for the x86_64 platform. This includes systems with AMD's Athlon64 and Opteron processors, and those with Intel's EM64T CPU.

You can download an install CD image from our normal FTP install server:
<ftp://linst.bu.edu/zodiac/x86_64/images/zodiac64-installer.iso>

If you're burning this to CD under MS Windows, make sure to use the "burn image" feature of your CD-creation software.

Thanks again to Dan Kamalic and Biomedical Engineering for their assistance with additional hardware for this project.

Note: BU Linux 4.5 Server (Zodiac) is also available for 32-bit x86 systems. The install image for 32-bit Zodiac can be found at: <ftp://linst.bu.edu/zodiac/i386/images/zodiac-installer.iso>.