On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Nate Coraor <nate@bx.psu.edu> wrote:
On Dec 20, 2011, at 1:09 PM, Bicak, Mesude wrote:
Dear Galaxy Developers,
We work in Professor Dawn Field's group (Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Research Group) at the NERC Environmental Bioinformatics Centre (NEBC) of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) Research Institute based in Oxford.
We develop and distribute Bio-Linux (http://nebc.nerc.ac.uk/tools/bio-linux), which is a customised Ubuntu distribution that comes with 500+ bioinformatics packages. Within our research group we also provide bioinformatics analysis for NERC-funded researchers, and recently started looking into Galaxy as well. It didn't take us long to discover its power and we would like to enable Bio-Linux users to install, run and maintain the Galaxy server with minimal effort, also with the aim to spread the word on Galaxy in Europe!
Recently we took on a project with Dr. Casey Bergman from University of Manchester as the Principal Investigator, to package all the necessary Galaxy dependencies for Ubuntu/Bio-Linux. As many pre-requisities are already included with Bio-Linux, we are already some way down this path. New packages that we create will appear in a Launchpad PPA (https://launchpad.net/~nebc/+archive/galaxy).
We will be happy to hear any comments regarding these efforts and we hope that this will be a useful resource for all Galaxy users. Once the initial packaging is done, we hope to collaborate with Galaxy team in maintaining and improving this resource.
Best wishes, Tim, Soon and Mesude
Hi Mesude,
This is fantastic, thanks for letting us know, and please do post up if there is anything we can help with. Also, if you're not aware, Galaxy's cloud offering is built on CloudBioLinux, which itself is built on Bio-Linux.
--nate
This is very good news, I'm personally a big fan of avoiding as much as possible installing from source on production systems, as things can get easily out of hand when trying to keep everything updated. Mesude, I recently joined Debian Med (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/ and https://launchpad.net/~debian-med) which the exact same goal of getting as much tools as possible packaged for Debian/Ubuntu. I see Tim Booth is an active member in Debian Med and I was wondering if your group is planning to keep the development of these packages in the git/svn repositories of Debian Med. I wouldn't want to duplicate your efforts. I like very much the use of PPAs while waiting for packages to be officially included in Debian and trickle down to Ubuntu, process that could be somehow slow at times. Just today I was able to upload Tophat's package being developed at Debian Med to the PPA, I'm pretty sure it needs more work, but you might be interested in taking a look. Kind regards, Carlos