Using a Live USB stick, one can experience the GNU/Linux operating system and applications without installing it on a computer. The system runs from the USB stick instead of the hard-disk. An ISO image to make a Live USB stick is available. It is based on Linux Mint distribution is.
- Download the ISO Image(around 5.5 GB). The MD5sum
- Windows users may download rufus to create a bootable USB stick from the ISO image.
Software on the Live USB
- Firefox fast, lightweight, privacy-focused Web Browser
- LibreOffice free office suite
- VLC Media player
- GIMP, image manipulation program
- Inkscape, vector graphics editor
- Scribus, desktop publishing application
- LaTeX, a powerful typesetting system
- LyX, a graphical (WYSIWYM) interface for LaTex
- Openshot, video editing software
- GNUplot, command-line driven graphing utility.
- Labplot, scientific plotting programs.
- Grace, WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool.
- GeoGebra, powerful mathematics software
- xmaxima, Computer algebra system (CAS).
- RasMol, molecular visualization tool
- TuxPaint, drawing program designed for young children.
- Geany, powerful and lightweight programmer’s text editor.
Science and Electronics Experiments
- ExpEYES, A tool for learning science by exploring and experimenting.
- KuttyPy, Micro-controller development system
Language Compilers:
- C and C++ compilers
- gfortran, FORTRAN compiler that supports Fortran 77, 90, 95, 2003, 2008
- Python Interpreter with the following modules Python Book
- Numpy and Scipy, Scientific computation
- Matplotlib, 2D and 3D data visualisation
- Mayavi, a powerful 3D scientific data visualization toolkit
- Pandas, powerful data analysis and manipulation library Python and Pandas Book
- Scikit-learn, machine learning library Machine Learning Book
- PyQt5 is a set of Python bindings for Qt5, a powerful cross-platform GUI framework
- PyQtGraph, a fast, lightweight graphics and GUI library designed for scientific and engineering visualization.
- Psycopg2, module to comunicate to postgreql database
- SQLAlchemy, SQL toolkit and Object-Relational Mapper. Pandas uses it.
- mysql.connector, communication to Mariadb/MySQL databases
- Jupyter Notebook, interactive computing environment
- PHP, a server-side scripting language designed for web development. Connection to Postgreql
Web and Database servers
- NGINX (pronounced “engine-x”),a widely used high-performance web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache.
- PostgreSQL, a powerful, object-relational database system known for its stability, feature-richness, and standards compliance.
- MariaDB, relational database system that is a drop-in replacement for MySQL.
Boot your computer from Live USB
MSWindows systems should be shut down properly (after disabling the fastboot option) before booting from Live USB.
- Go to Control Panel → Power Options → Choose what the power buttons do.
- Click on “Change settings that are currently unavailable”.
- Under Shutdown settings, Uncheck the fast startup checkbutton.
- Shutdown the computer
You need to instruct the BIOS to boot from the USB stick, generally done by pressing one of the function keys while booting.
Press the powerbutton and press the required function key while booting, (should be quick). The function keys for various brands are listed below. More details can be found HERE
- F12 : Acer, Dell, Lenovo laptops, Samsung, Toshiba, Gigabyte BIOS
- F11 : ASRock BIOS, MSI, Sony VAIO
- F10 : Intel NUC
- F9 : Biostar
- F8 : Lenovo Desktops
- Esc or F8 : ASUS
- Esc → then F9 : HP
After booting from the Live USB, a menu will be shown. Select the first item and press the Enter key.
The system will be ready to use within around 50 seconds. The start menu behavior is similar to that of the MSWindows.
Setting up the Web and RDBMS servers
- Open a terminal from the taskbar and give the following command
This will start the Nginx web server and creates a database and a table on the postgres RDBMS system. Access the table by running the Python program pgtest.py
- open Firefox and access the URL localhost (the scischool.in website hosted locally should appear)
- localhost/pgtest.php should access the database and display the contents.
- Start the Geany IDE from the ‘Programming’ menu
- open and run pgtest.py, mayavi-tests.py and pg-pandas.py
MariaDB configuration
- sudo mariadb-secure-installation
it will ask several questions.
- Set a root password and use the same inside the python program init-mariadb.py (currently it is maria123).
- For the option ‘Switch to unix_socket authentication’, select No
- Press enter for other prompts, to choose the default.
- after finishing the script, run the following python programs
- python init-mariadb.py
- python mariadb-test.py
How the Live USB is made
The Live USB is prepared using Cubic, linuxmint-22.1-cinnamon-64bit.iso as the starting point. Pacckages added/removed are listed below:
apt remove brltty
apt install mariadb-server php-fpm php-mysql php-curl php-gd php-xml php-mbstring php-zip unzip wget postgresql php-pgsql \
nginx htop gdebi geany gimp inkscape scribus vlc openshot-qt labplot grace evince texlive-xetex fonts-smc-rachana \
jupyter python3-numpy python3-scipy python3-sympy python3-matplotlib python3-pyqt5 python3-sklearn-pandas python3-pandas \
python3-xlsxwriter python3-psycopg2 python3-sqlalchemy python3-mysql.connector rasmol mayavi2 maxima geogebra tuxpaint lyx gfortran
Installed using gdebi:
gdebi seelab-1.0.3.deb
gdebi KuttyPy-1.0.25.deb
gdebi scischool-1.0.0.deb # scischool.in website contents and some intitialization scripts.
External Links
General topics
A COMMENTARY ON THE SIXTH EDITION UNIX OPERATING SYSTEM by J. Lions
