Slackware in academia

They really had to export PDFs from LibreOffice when TeX, ConTeXT, groff, asciidoctor are available?

Not defending their documentation, but I looked into this only a couple of years ago. They use in-house tools that try to embrace the single source approach. That said, your reply loosely affirms my statement about the challenge of single sourcing being the Holy Grail. Nobody really has a nice solution.

At one time tool chains based on DocBook and XSL were supposed to resolve the challenge. Another part of the challenge is users. Most people need visual feedback of the basic formatting. The tool chains never quite provided that. Kind of the classic "rinse and repeat" conundrum -- change content and then render the output in various formats to view the final formatting. There are some editing tools that try to cover all the bases, but most writers want to write and not deal with complicated tool chains.

Originally Posted by upnort Not defending their documentation, but I looked into this only a couple of years ago. They use in-house tools that try to embrace the single source approach. That said, your reply loosely affirms my statement about the challenge of single sourcing being the Holy Grail. Nobody really has a nice solution.

I spent an evening going through the documentation for groff's mom macros and I was able to export a reasonably complex document to PDF at the end, with a more than satisfactory result. Red Hat would find this too difficult? Have you seen the state of their PDFs?

Originally Posted by upnort At one time tool chains based on DocBook and XSL were supposed to resolve the challenge. Another part of the challenge is users. Most people need visual feedback of the basic formatting. The tool chains never quite provided that. Kind of the classic "rinse and repeat" conundrum -- change content and then render the output in various formats to view the final formatting. There are some editing tools that try to cover all the bases, but most writers want to write and not deal with complicated tool chains.

I agree, but if people don't consider typography important in the production of text then they shouldn't be surprised if readers switch off before the end. It's difficult these days, with so many different screen sizes and page layouts, to keep your eyes from getting tired. The least a business like Red Hat could do is provide documents that look professional, and are readable.

Originally Posted by Gerard Lally I prefer groff with Peter Schaffter's mom macros myself; much smaller, and typographically just as pleasing. (It seems Peter's website is down; hopefully it's just temporary.)

By sheer coincidence the domain was up for renewal just yesterday. Problem solved now and website accessible once more.

maybe i should join the party...

I have a PhD in immunology and cell biology, before that I got a MSc in biochemistry. I have been a Slackware user since 2005, when Slackware was version 10.1. In my PhD studies and later in my work as a postdoc, I used Slackware as a platform for computational biology. The latest paper from the group I work in was published over a month ago in Scientific Reports. There, I cited Slackware and SlackBuilds.org in the end of the Materials and Methods section. It's the least I can do for Slackware, really.

You can read my announcement to the SBo mailing list. Also, there's the entry in my blog about the paper.

As I wrote to the SBo mailing list, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Slackware and the (SBo) community.

ah, and another thing -- I happen to be the maintainer of (almost all) the bioinformatics stuff I use at SBo.

Originally Posted by solarfields maybe i should join the party... I have a PhD in immunology and cell biology, before that I got a MSc in biochemistry. I have been a Slackware user since 2005, when Slackware was version 10.1. In my PhD studies and later in my work as a postdoc, I used Slackware as a platform for computational biology. The latest paper from the group I work in was published over a month ago in Scientific Reports. There, I cited Slackware and SlackBuilds.org in the end of the Materials and Methods section. It's the least I can do for Slackware, really. You can read my announcement to the SBo mailing list. Also, there's the entry in my blog about the paper. As I wrote to the SBo mailing list, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Slackware and the (SBo) community.

Fantastic job! Now this is the type of publicity/promotion Slackware needs, real world value!

I wrote my PhD thesis in medical anthropology using Slackware. LaTeX of course, but I made heavy use of Emacs (with ESS, polymode, AUCTeX, and a bunch of other stuff) with R and knitr for the statistical analyses. On the referencing side JabRef and ivy-bibtex were great, and for searching my paper database Recoll was invaluable. Other cool stuff was GoldenDict (dictionary lookup), BorgBackup (de-duplicating backup), and f4transkript for interview transcriptions. All done on Slack 14.2, which never failed me!

Ph. D. in math - however for professional purposes it does not matter whether it is Linux or other system supporting some TeX editor. Nowadays I use primarily TeXworks. In the past emacs with auctex plugin, kile. Once I learned little Linux can't switch back to Windows - I try to use it time to time- but always found it to have lack of functionality I am get used to running Linux.

Originally Posted by igadoter Ph. D. in math - however for professional purposes it does not matter whether it is Linux or other system supporting some TeX editor. Nowadays I use primarily TeXworks. In the past emacs with auctex plugin, kile. Once I learned little Linux can't switch back to Windows - I try to use it time to time- but always found it to have lack of functionality I am get used to running Linux.

Well this will teach me to be judgmental - I always thought you were a bit of an oddball [rich coming from me, I know] but a maths PhD is impressive. Next Drakeo will come in here talking about his astrophysics postdoc.

Originally Posted by Lysander666 Well this will teach me to be judgmental - I always thought you were a bit of an oddball [rich coming from me, I know] but a maths PhD is impressive. Next Drakeo will come in here talking about his astrophysics postdoc.

Academics are typically oddballs, so it makes sense.

At least there are some people impressed. Ok I can tell you nice problem I found on ##math freenode: numbers can be encoded with 0's and 1's, say 2 is 10 4 is 100 etc. But there is also different way to encode number only with 0's and 1'. Say let take 7- then one take decimal number with only 0's and 1's as digits - say 1001 - with property that 7 divides this number - but there are many such - so let take smallest. For 7 it is 1001. Problem is does it really true code - every number can be encoded in such a way? Answer is yes. So some things are really funny. One can even write program to calculate such a code for given number.

Hi there!

My first post here. I'm a meteorologist and doing research in Physical Oceanography.

I have been a Slackware user for some years and that's my fav distro. It helped me a lot in my academic works.

Is there someone else working in these fields here?

Hi

I've got a PhD in Marine Biology (2000). Moved to Slackware in late 1994 because of a problematic MSc thesis done in Word for Windows. I had to program my charts in HP-GL language. Do you remember when printers and plotters came with detailed documentation? Doing large documents (~140 pages) in word was so frustrating that I quit windows and move to Slackware (Yggdrasil was available as well). I've been a happy Slacker since then. I'm obviously in the 51-60 cohort (already voted on the poll)

If I can remember, my first Slack was 2.0 or 2.1, still distributed in floppy disks. I was introduced to Slack by a friend geographer that used grass gis which was only available in linux. My PhD thesis was done in Latex running on Slackware 3.9. Today I maintain 4 servers and two desktop computers at work (two different places), all with slack 14.2 (and since last week my main is running current just to check). They are used mostly for phylogenetics, genomics and for databases. I've got a laptop (an ASUS VivoBook with a touch screen) that I use mostly when traveling or in classes, and runs Slackware 14.2. It includes the Apache server to which students can connect to during the class, mostly with home made statistical software that I developed in C++ (using CGI) and currently ported to Javascript. At home, me + wife and kids all use Slackware 14.2 (1 desktop and 3 laptops) with Alien's kde5 and virtualized windows because of school. Wife used to be a Biologist but is now dedicated to production in a chamber orchestra. Although she was offered a MacBook Air, she kept her Slackware machine for personal use!

Wife used to be a Biologist but is now dedicated to production in a chamber orchestra. Although she was offered a MacBook Air, she kept her Slackware machine for personal use!

she's a keeper