SciSchool.in

Using a Live USB stick, one can experience the GNU/Linux operating system and applications without installing it on a computer.An ISO image based on Linux Mint is available.

• Download the ISO Image(around 6 GB). The MD5sum

• Windows users may download rufus to create a bootable USB stick from the ISO image.

In order to boot your computer from the USB stick:

• shutdown the computer
• insert the USB stick
• Switch on the computer and press the required Function key while starting (F9, F12, DEL, etc. depending on the BIOS) to get the boot selection menu
• Select the USB disk option as the boot device
• From the Mint boot menu select the first item

Contents of the Live USB

After booting from the USB stick, you can use it for testing any of the applications listed below. Tools are available for learning several programming languages, like C,C++, FORTRAN, Python. R, PHP etc. Web and RDBMS servers are available, along with example programs to access them from Python and PHP.

Applications

• Geany, powerful and lightweight programmer’s text editor.
• Jupyter Notebook, interactive computing environment (mainly for Python programming)
• Firefox fast, lightweight, privacy-focused Web Browser
• LibreOffice free office suite
• LaTeX, a powerful typesetting system
• LyX, a graphical (WYSIWYM) interface for LaTex
• VLC Media player
• GIMP, image manipulation program
• Inkscape, vector graphics editor
• Scribus, desktop publishing application
• 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.
• ExpEYES, A tool for learning science by exploring and experimenting.
• KuttyPy, Micro-controller development system

Programming Languages

• Python Interpreter with the following modules
  • 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
  • Scikit-learn, machine learning library
  • 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, Python module to comunicate to postgresql database
  • SQLAlchemy, SQL toolkit and Object-Relational Mapper. Pandas uses it.
  • mysql.connector, communication to Mariadb/MySQL databases
• R programming language, for statistical computing
• C and C++ compilers
• gfortran, FORTRAN compiler that supports Fortran 77, 90, 95, 2003, 2008

Python Books

• Python for Education, by Ajith Kumar
• Python for Data Analysis, by Wes McKinney (external link)
• Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow, by Aurélien Géron (external link)

Web Server

NGINX (pronounced “engine-x”),a widely used high-performance web server, is installed. To test it,

• open Firefox and access the URL localhost (the scischool.in website hosted locally should appear)
• If WIFI is connected, you can find out the assigned IP address by issuing the command ifconfig. You can access the website from other machines, on the same subnet, using this IP address.

PHP, a server-side scripting language designed for web development. PHP has been installed and the Web Server is configured to use PHP. You can test it by running a sample program that conencts to the Postgresql RDBMS running on the same machine. Connect to Postgreql using PHP

Postgresql RDBMS

PostgreSQL, a powerful, object-relational database system known for its stability, feature-richness, and standards compliance. The live USB runs Postgresql (uses port number 5433 instead of the default port 5432). During initialization, a database named test is created and a table added. The Python programs pgtest.py and pg-pandas.py, kept inside the home directory, can be used to test the database.

MariaDB RDBMS

MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for the MySQL RDBMS. It is installed but the user needs to run the script mariadb-secure-installation from a command terminal,to make it usable. The password set during this process is used in the Python program init-matiadb.py, given in the home directory.

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 (kept inside the home directory)
  • python init-mariadb.py
  • python mariadb-test.py

GNUKhata, A Free & Open Source Business Accounting Software

This could not be included in the liveUSB because the latest version supports only Docker Installation. Docker is included in the LiiveUSB. GNUKhata can be installed by running the shell script gk-install.sh (NOT in the Live mode). After installation, run the script /root/.local/share/gnukhata/run_docker_compose.sh. Then open http://localhost:2020 from the broswer. After that connect to GKcore using http://localhost:6543, to create user accounts.

How to 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.

Procedure to prepare the Live USB stick

The Live USB is prepared using Cubic, linuxmint-22.2-mate-64bit.iso as the starting point. Pacckages added/removed are listed below:

apt remove brltty
apt install synaptic 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 gnuplot 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 xmaxima geogebra tuxpaint lyx gfortran
r-base r-base-core r-base-dev docker-compose docker.io

Installed using gdebi:
gdebi seelab-1.0.3.deb      # Science Experiments using ExpEYES
gdebi KuttyPy-1.0.25.deb    # Micro-controller development
gdebi scischool-1.0.0.deb   # scischool.in website contents and some intitialization scripts.

External Links

• A PDF presentation on the Free Software movement.
• Documentary on GNU/Linux
• Open Letter on OOXML lobbying in India by Microsoft
• Microsoft lobbying in India on OOXML

General topics

A COMMENTARY ON THE SIXTH EDITION UNIX OPERATING SYSTEM by J. Lions