Linux Watch: Open Discovery

Open Discovery is a Fedora 9 derived USB based distribution with open source Bioinformatics tools pre-installed.

It's nice that they are bundling all of this in a USB bootable distribution for all those Bioinformatians that prefer Windows. However, I'm curious why they chose to go for a whole new distribution rather then simple creating a new YUM repository, like RPM Fusion, that can be added to an existing standard Fedora install.


If you are interested Open Discovery includes:

• EMBOSS
  
• ClustalX
• Jalview
• Sequence Manipulation Suite(SMS2)
• Phylip
• HMMER
  
• BLAT
• Alfresco
  
• Mfold
  
• Pymol
• SwissPdb Viewer
• Cn3D
  
• Rasmol
  
• Jackal
• Swiss model
  
• Gromacs
• NAMD
• AutoDock
• PatchDock
  
• STC
• Open Babel
  

Via Bioinformatics.org

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GCC compiler directives

When ever you start coding on separate platforms, you need to start
thinking about compiler directives.   That way, you can write
separate code for different needs. Follow the break to find out how to take advantage of GCC compiler directives.



To get the list of directives
from gcc use the command

echo "" | gcc -E -dM -

Using this you can find the gcc for linux and MacOS have the directive
'__linux' and '__APPLE__'

An example of how I use this info is my OpenGL header file requests.

#if __linux
#define  GL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES
#include <GL/gl.h>
#include <GL/glu.h>
#include <GL/glext.h>
#include <GL/glut.h>
#else
#if __APPLE__
#include <opengl/gl.h>
#include <opengl/glu.h>
#include <glut/glut.h>
#endif
#endif

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