Our starting points...

We plan on building Impilo from the following rules:

• We use the “Virtual Machine” approach.
  • Rationale: Most of the students are not very comfortable at starting their computers from a CD/DVD and they might not even have this recourse because people running computer labs might have either remove the drives or disable them. A virtual machine is more natural and allows sharing of files between the real and the virtual machines. VirtualBox was selected because it is free for personal use and it can create “appliances” that are easily transported from one operating system to another. Nevertheless, creating a LiveCD edition is on our TODO list.

• Start from the latest Ubuntu LTS version(right now: 10.04) using theminimal Ubuntu installer.
  • Rationale 1: We want to focus on finding the best applications in bio-informatics, not always rebuilding from scratch each time an OS comes out…Using a stable and long-lived distro base makes sense.
  • Rationale 2: Using the minimal Ubuntu installer allows us to create the smallest possible system with basic functions.
  • Rationale 3: Ubuntu has a vast library of softwares to fill all of one's needs outside bioinformatics.

• Use a solid graphical desktop but let's choose it small and frugal on resources.
  • Rationale: we want this distro to be functional on the largest selection of machines as possible. To do so, we chose Xfce4, which provide a satisfying user experience while running on slim resources. We chose not to use Xubuntu to keep the distro small and focused.

• Install only the apps needed to the specified tasks.
  • Rationale 1: Bioinformatics is our focus so video editors are not needed Outside of bioinformatics, our needs are: Access to Internet resources and basic editing of documents; their installation is done via Ubuntu packages and apt-get.
  • Rationale 2: Because Ubuntu does not always have the latest version or any version at all of some apps, the Impilo policy is to use source code or code obtained directly from the creator of a given tool as much as possible.