To be built around the KDE desktop environment

Jun 26, 2015 19:17 GMT  ·  By

After proposing Frappe Web framework, two-week Fedora Atomic Host releases, system firmware updates for UEFI, default local DNS resolver, and SELinux policy store migration, Jan Kurik comes today, June 26, with the proposal of a Fedora Astronomy Spin.

Proposed for the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, the Fedora Astronomy Spin aims to offer a complete desktop environment with a collection of applications targeted at amateur and professional astronomers alike.

"At the moment, there is no such distribution which offers a set of professional open-source tools for astronomers and astrophysicists and Fedora is very popular in astronomers' environment (that it is strongly linux-based)," reads the proposal.

It would appear that GNU/Linux distributions are very popular among professional and amateur astronomers and astrophysicists, so creating a special edition for their needs seems like a smart move from the Fedora Project.

The Fedora Astronomy Spin promises to provide a complete scientific environment based on the Python 2 and 3 dynamic programming languages, and packed with some of the best open-source software for data analysis, including Astropy and AstrOmatic.

Furthermore, KDE's KStars application will be pre-installed in the Astronomy Spin of Fedora Linux to provide a full solution for astrophotography. All these great astronomy software will be collected in a single menu entry for easy access.

Fedora Astronomy Spin will use the latest KDE desktop environment

The new Fedora flavor for astronomers will be distributed as an installable live media built around the latest version of the KDE desktop environment. It promises to offer a ready-to-work installation for aspiring astronomers.

At the moment, the Fedora Astronomy Spin awaits a trademark approval from the Fedora Council. If it gets approved, the Astronomy Spin will be distributed on the Fedora Spin website at https://spins.fedoraproject.org.