Fedora 20 Scientific Released
by Amit
Fedora 20 is now released, which also means the newest release of Fedora Scientific along with other spins are also available.
Download
You can download the spin images from here.
What’s new in Fedora Scientific
The notable additions in this release are:
- Sage, along with Sage notebook.
- SymPy, the Python library for Symbolic mathematics
- The Python 3 versions for scipy, numpy, matplotlib libraries and IPython (including IPython notebook)
- Commons math, a Java library for numerical computing
The Fedora 20 release notes are here.
Fedora Scientific Documentation
I started work on some documentation for Fedora Scientific about a month or so back. It is far from what I want it to be, but you can see the current version here. The first goal that I have in mind is to document all the major scientific tools and libraries that are shipped with Fedora Scientific. By document, I imply links to the official project resources and guides. The second goal is to actually add original content and make it a guide book for Fedora Scientific which may be used as an entry point for Open Source Scientific Computing. Once the guide has taken some shape, an RPM package can be created and distributed with Fedora Scientific so that the entire documentation is available for offline perusal.
Contributing
The Fedora Scientific documentation is an excellent starting point if you are looking to make a contribution to Fedora Scientific. You can view the project here.
If you have some toy/throwaway scripts that makes use of one of the libraries/tools, you may want to contribute it to the
“tests” here. They will help sanity check these libraries and tools during the development of upcoming Fedora Scientific releases.
Discussions and support
Please join the Fedora scitech mailing list.
Suggetions and ideas? Please leave a comment.
Programming and writing about it. 
but yet flash doesnt work out of the box ;)
Not until it is supported by free/open software, see also: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash
Unless you’re advocating fedora changes it’s policies on freedom…
The documentation looks like it is off to a great start! Do you have any interest in putting a Scientific Spin guide up at docs.fedoraproject.org? I’d be happy to help make it happen.
Hi Pete, thanks for your suggestion. Yes, I think it would be great. However, I am afraid the material right now barely warrants a place there since a lot remains incomplete. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time to work on it to at least complete the stage 1 of my plans anytime soon.
What do you think?
Hopefully, you won’t be the only one to participate! It would be much better if other members of the SciTech SIG could help put it together and maintain it. I can help a little with the content, and more with markup and deployment. If there’s interest, reach out to docs@lists.fp.o and we can start planning.
Pete: It took me a few months, but i think i am getting close to complete the phase 1 of my plans. I will get in touch with docs list soon. Thanks for your offer to help and i look forward to discuss this with you on the list further.