Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 13, 2026

Quantian

Quantian OS was a remastering of Knoppix/Debian for computational sciences. The environment was self-configuring and directly bootable CD/DVD that turns any PC or laptop into a Linux workstation. Quantian also incorporated clusterKnoppix and added support for openMosix, including remote booting of light clients in an openMosix terminal server context permitting rapid setup of a SMP cluster computer.

Last revised
Jul 13, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
255 w
Citations
Source
Quantian
DeveloperDirk Eddelbuettel
OS familyLinux (Unix-like)
Working stateCurrent
Source modelOpen source
Latest release7.9.2 / March 1, 2006
Official websiteQuantian Home Page

Quantian OS was a remastering of Knoppix/Debian for computational sciences. The environment was self-configuring and directly bootable CD/DVD that turns any PC or laptop (provided it can boot from cdrom/DVD) into a Linux workstation. Quantian also incorporated clusterKnoppix and added support for openMosix, including remote booting of light clients in an openMosix terminal server context permitting rapid setup of a SMP cluster computer.

Applications

Some scientific applications in Quantian source ↗

Numerous software packages for usual or scientific aims come with Quantian. After the installation, total package volume is about 2.7 GB.

The packages for "home users" include:

Additionally, some of the scientific applications/programs in Quantian are such like:

  • R, statistical computing software
  • Octave, a Matlab clone
  • Scilab, another Matlab clone
  • GSL, GNU Scientific Library
  • Maxima computer algebra system
  • Python programming language with Scipy
  • Fityk curve fitter
  • Ghemical for computational chemistry
  • Texmacs for wysiwyg scientific editing
  • Grass geographic information system
  • OpenDX and MayaVi data visualisation systems
  • Gnuplot, a command-line driven interactive data and function plotting utility
  • LabPlot, an application for plotting of data sets and functions
External links