More and more Linux distros have spread around lately due to the greedy interest showed by developers in creating new personalized versions of Linux. Distributions such as Christian Edition or Scientific Edition are already on the stage and they are getting ready for new improvements. While the Christian Edition developers have already announced a new release based on the latest Linux version, 7.04 a.k.a Feisty Fawn, Connie Sieh, the main developer of Fermi Linux (part of the Scientific Linux developers), has recreantly made public the release of scientific Linux 5.0.

Built out of some source packages belonging to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and fully compatible with it, SL 5.0 brings up some new additions that address mainly the users from the scientific community. It also includes some graph visualization tools and a small window manger for the X Window System, called icewm. There can also be noticed updates in the multimedia domain and also in the security area.

Highlights:

￭ some useful perl modules have been added
￭ Yumex graphical user interface for yum
￭ yum-utilx - a collection of utilities and examples for yum package manager
￭ r100 device driver released for some RealTek Ethernet controllers
￭ R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics
￭ Nedit GUI text editor for the X Window System;

Scientific Linux 5.0 comes with changes in some rpms packages too, among the numerous additions and improvements. For example, there are the packages that change the default rhn configuration to use yum and points this configuration to ftp.scientificlinux.org, or the packages to change the default theme from RHEL to EaseOfBlue. SL 5.0 does not ask for any keys and provides access to all packages by combining all the rpms from Client, Server, VT, Cluster, ClusterStorage, and Workstation into the SL directory.

You can download Scientific Linux 5.0 right now from Softpedia.