I hope this is the correct forum for this question

I just found out about this distro using search on these forums and it kind of excited me because I am a chemistry student. I was wondering if anyone has used it and if so does it have any Chemsketch equivalent programs included with it ?

If not (or even if it does) do you have any suggestions of programs that are the same as (on a ease of use/quick to pick up scale) or better than for simple/quick organic and inorganic modeling/reaction modeling ?

I think the name be a bit misleading. It is basically a clone of that RH company's distro. It is a good choice but not really better as such, nor is it scientific as such. It does have a solid foundation where one could use it for what you need if other elements exist. Documentation and support is very good and third party apps may be one of the greatest. It is a good choice.

As to Chemsketch you'd have to find those types of programs and see if 1) they have a version for linux of any kind, 2) if not then see if it can be run under an emulator such as wine or crossover office.

I'd have to contact a professor I know that teaches chemistry, he may know if and linux programs would suite his students. Might as your school too.

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scientific Linux would be a good choice for running that electron microscope that the lab is building from scratch . Or any other lab equipment or for use IN THE lab

but on say a laptop or home desktop ??? not so great.
i have not used these , but for Arch there is
extra/chemtool 1.6.12-3
----A small program for drawing chemical structures
extra/openbabel 2.2.3-1
----A library designed to interconvert between many file formats used in
----molecular modeling and computational chemistry.
extra/xdrawchem 1.9.9-7
----A two-dimensional molecule drawing program for Unix operating systems. It
----can read and write MDL Molfiles, and read ChemDraw text and binary files, to
----allow sharing between XDrawChem and other chemistry applications, and it can
----create images in popular formats like PNG and EPS.
community/ghemical 2.99.2-4
----Computational chemistry package.
community/libghemical 2.99.1-1
----Library containing computational chemistry facility of ghemical
community/liboglappth 0.98-2
----Library containing computational chemistry facility of ghemical

and that is just the standard repo for Arch Linux

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Thanks for the replies, I saw CERN and Fermilabs attached to the distro and my inner geek kind of came out. I know my school itself runs its NMR and IR machines off of windows boxes/software, and I love chemsketch for the tool that it is even with it's limitations in naming unless you buy a license.

Other than my physics prof I doubt anyone in the chemistry department has or would touch Linux, they are to used to windows and the tools they have been using for years on it so the likely hood of them actually being able to name some equivalent programs is slim.

I may still look into the distro/programs more because the idea of some open source program doing as much or more than $1k+ programs is nice to me (nothing will replace my Merck Index unfortunately, the Windows version of it is amazing).

Thanks again for the replies though

You can just Google .. chemsketch linux ..
to find replacement suggestions.

Example : ' pymol '.

..