Distro Astro – Linux Distribution for Astronomy | Hacker News Reader

Distro Astro – Linux Distribution for Astronomy

distroastro.org

58 pointsjonbaer15 comments

I used to cheer for all those special-purpose distros, but I've found that I'm not a one-purpose guy, so I was always juggling several live CDs.

I guess it's nice if you have an PC in some lab, but a general-purpose distro fits most scenarios much better.

I like how this is handled in Fedora, with package groups. I can just do "sudo dnf group install '3D Printing'" and I get all the necessary software and configs needed to work with 3D printers and 3D modelling.

They also have different spins for different purpose distros, but that's just specific groups installed on the live media, and the default install will just setup whatever the spin was made for. But you can still get it all using dnf.

I've used Ubuntu for 8 years now, but your description of package groups makes me want to give Fedora a try.

Looks like Fedora 24 is going to get an astronomy spin. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Astronomy_Spin It'll be based on the KDE spin, so it's general purpose but then has astro specific stuff included.

It's a great way to get newcomers interested though

Speaking as a person who knows nothing, where do you get astronomical data to work with?

There has to be something more than just setting up your own telescope out there, which I couldn't do where I am.

https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html

Awesome. I knew someone had to know.

You can download Kepler data from MAST (be warned, it's in an arcane image format know as FITS).

Installing one in a VM is probably a good way to find out what packages are available for that speciality (that is my plan after seing this anyway).

The Fedora groups mentioned by iamtew is probably just as effective thou, if you use Fedora.

Special purpose distros are great. They show off what can be done, get new people interested in open source with their turnkey approach, and inevitably contribute upsream. Another one that stands out is http://caelinux.com

Portage has a nice sci-* selection: https://bpaste.net/show/88a217cc325f

The Night Mode for the website itself is a nice touch! (The nights can be very long when collecting light).

I wish I had known about this sooner. Installing IRAF was always a pain (though less so after they released just one big tarball for Linux/x86)

Is it based on any major distribution

Seems to be a mix of Debian/Ubuntu/Mint packages, some extras.

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