We use a variety of software packages, many of which are open-source. The systems we manage and use are running openSUSE and SLES (9) versions of the Linux operating system. While much of the open-source software can simply be downloaded from the installation media provided by openSUSE/Novell, some of it is not in the standard package format. When possible, instead of downloading, compiling, and installing the relevant source code directly, we compile them into the standard RPM package format. For ia64 architecture, we do so on our own systems and provide them at http://www.vrdc.cornell.edu/extras/, but for x86_64 architecture, we are using the openSUSE Build Service. You can find our packages at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cornell_vrdc/. On modern openSUSE systems, you can add this "repository" with
sudo zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cornell_vrdc/{VERSION} cornell_vrdc
where {VERSION} is your version number, e.g. "openSUSE_11.0". Packages are available for openSUSE 11.0, and depending on the package, for various RHEL or Fedora distributions as well.
