Just in case anyone's interested... I've been working on a live linux CD, based on Mandrake 9.2, which showcases free chemistry software. We had an Open Source Symposium here in Toronto recently, and I was invited to talk about Mandrake live CD's in general. So I made some copies of 'FreeChem 0.9' and gave them out at the lecture.
The attendance was very good, the interest level was very very good, and the response was AMAZING. Many people asked questions both after the lecture and throughout the rest of the day. It seems that there is a definite desire for people to be able to easily make their own specialized live CD's by themselves. I have put up the slides from the presentation, but they do not depict WHAT I said, only an outline of the topic matter. http://groundstate.ca/freechem-pres.pdf One of the coolest ideas I got was from a guy who suggested that USB memory cards be used as the /home directory. This is a brilliant idea... as you could walk around with the liveCD, and your USB memory card, and you would essentially have your desktop in your pocket, that would run on almost any workstation anywhere, with your /home/.hidden files and everything. It would be cool if the liveCD startup script would automatically mount the USB memory card as /home if it was inserted before boot time, but as /mnt/usbram (or similar) if inserted after bootup. I'm planning on finishing freechem 1.0 (possibly to be renamed), and distributing it through the authors of the chemistry applications themselves. Then I plan on making an audio production liveCD, but I'm waiting for cooker to re-open first, so I can update jack, alsa-tools, and a few other things. Thanks to Jaco and Buchan for all their help. Austin -- Austin Acton Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant, Ph.D. Candidate Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto MandrakeLinux Volunteer Developer, homepage: www.groundstate.ca
