VigyaanCD

Setting Up your own Bioinformatics workstation using VigyaanCD

VigyaanCD at
http://www.vigyaancd.org/
has a nice collection of bioinformatics software and is worth downloading. It will boot directly from the CD and needs very little linux expertise as the X-windows system is almost like windows. However I wanted to use it along with windows and I did not want to reboot every time I switch operating system. This is the story of how I set up VigyaanCD on a second hand PIII and use it from my win XP laptop.

I bought a second hand IBM PIII, 450 MHz, 10MB HDD and 128 MB RAM. I formatted the hard disk and added the following partitions
/boot 2GB (ext2), /knophome 6GB (ext2) /knopswap (vfat) /dos (vfat)
My video card supports only 800x600

I copied the CD image to the boot partition with the knoppix tohd =/dev/hda1 command. I created a persistent home directory in /knophome partition and a swap in /knopswap

I start with the following command.
Knoppix screen=800x600 fromhd home=scan noprompt noeject

I will write about how to set up the NX server and run the NX client from laptop to access it in my next post.