Spin Me Right Round

I know a lot of you folks use Ubuntu, but I grew up with Red Hat (remember when buying an O'Reilly book with a CD was the easiest way to get a distro?), so I wanted to share my excitement about some neat "spins" in the latest Fedora release that may be of interest to the group.

Fedora Electronic Lab

The Fedora Electronic Lab is a group of packages "dedicated to support the innovation and development brought by opensource Electronic Design Automation (EDA) community."

The effort aims to boost innovation by providing free, turn-key access to tools and capabilities for

  • Verilog code generation.
  • Analog/Digital ASIC design and circuit simulations.
  • Modeling, PCB design and HDL synthesis.
  • Post tape-out chip testing facilities.
  • Embedded Systems Development.
  • Verification means for hardware description languages (VHDL and Verilog).
  • Standard cell libraries supporting up to a feature size of 0.13 m.
  • Extracted spice decks which can be simulated with any spice simulators.
  • Interoperability between various packages in order to achieve different design flows.
More details about the spin are available.

You can either download the spin, or add these packages to your existing Fedora install: yum groupinstall 'Electronic Lab'

Fedora Robotics Suite

The Fedora Robotics Suite "provides a wide variety of free and open robotics software packages. These range from hardware accessory libraries for the Hokuyo laser scanners or Katana robotic arm to software systems like Fawkes or Player/Stage and simulation environments such as Gazebo and RoboCup Soccer Simulation Server 2D/3D. It also provides a ready to use development environment for robotics including useful libraries such as OpenCV computer vision library, Festival text to speech system and MRPT."

You can either download the spin, or add these packages to your existing Fedora install: yum groupinstall 'Robotics'

Fedora Scientific KDE

The Fedora Scientific spin comes with lots of packages for doing analysis. Things like Octave (free, open source Matlab work-alike), Maxima (computer algebra system) and R (language for statistical computing). If you like to crunch numbers this spin will help you scratch that itch.

You can either download the spin, or add these packages to your existing Fedora install (I think this will get you most of the things in the spin): yum groupinstall 'Engineering and Scientific' 'Authoring and Publishing'

1 comment:

  1. I wasn't aware of spins, very cool! Since switching to Macs at home and being stuck in the dark ages at work, I haven't been doing anything with Linux. The Spin concept is appealing and it's great to see the Fedora is supporting it. Time to fire up those old PCs in the basement!

    I also started with Redhat and recall trying to download distros over dial-up and eventually caving in and buying a book w/ CD. And software shops sold boxes which contained CDs and printed manuals. I think I bought Redhat 5 in a box, used to keep it on a shelf as a reminder of the old days but it was purged recently.

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