First Webcast for the RCMI Program at the Medical Sciences Campus

The Center for Information Architecture in Research (CIAR) produced the first live webcast of a RCMI seminar from the Medical Sciences Campus on November 12, 2004. Introduction to Bioknoppix: Linux for the Life Sciences was presented by Carlos Rodríguez, Programmer from the Bioinformatics Research Center (BiRC) of the University of Puerto Rico High-Performance Computer facility (HPCf), with assistance from Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga, Coordinator of the BiRC. The webcast was performed at 4 Mbps using VideoLan.

Bioknoppix is a customized distribution of Knoppix Linux Live CD. With this distribution, the user just boots from the CD to have a fully functional Linux OS distribution with open source applications targeted for the molecular biologist. Besides using some RAM, Bioknoppix doesn't touch the host computer, being ideal for demonstrations, molecular biology students, and workshops. Bioknoppix includes tools such as EMBOSS, Jemboss, Artemis, ClustalX, BioPython, BioPerl and Bioconductor. The Bioknoppix effort is supported by HPCf and by the Puerto Rico Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN-PR). You can learn more about Bioknoppix at http://bioknoppix.hpcf.upr.edu

CIAR is indebted to the members of the Internet2/ResearchChannel Working Group for their assistance in making this webcast possible. This transmission was also possible thanks to the collaboration of the UPR HPCf and of Medical Sciences Campus Office of Information Systems.