Fedora 32 was released today after a full six months of development. There are a lot of improvements and new changes included in this release. You can read the announcement here and the complete release notes here.

This release is particularly exciting for the NeuroFedora team. It also marks the first release of our first deliverable: the CompNeuro Lab ISO image! The aim of developing such ready to install ISO images that are packed with the necessary tools is to enable users to quickly set up their computers and get down to work, instead of wasting precious time and effort on installing tools individually by hand. While we hope that this will enable researchers by providing them easy access to Free/Open Source research tools, we also hope that the platform will serve as a teaching aid in Computational Neuroscience courses.

This CompNeuro release includes a number of modelling related tools that we were able to package over the release:

• Auryn,
• Bionetgen,
• Calc: calcium-calculator,
• COPASI,
• GetDP,
• GENESIS,
• MOOSE,
• NEST simulator,
• NEURON,
• PyLEMS,
• Smoldyn,

All of these tools have been built with the current best practices in Software Development in mind---this is mandated by the Fedora community's software packaging guidelines. In addition to modelling tools, the ISO image also includes multiple tools used in analysis of data:

• the complete Python science stack: NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, IPython, SymPy, and Pandas,
• R,
• Julia.
• GNU Octave,
• GNUPlot,
• Paraview,

This is not all, though! There's even more Neuroscience software that can be installed from the repositories. Also, since this edition is derived from Fedora, users have access to the complete set of packages that are included in Fedora: all the desktop environments, productivity tools, development tools, and libraries that you can choose from.

The CompNeuro ISO image is based on the Fedora Workstation product that uses the modern GNOME desktop environment. It provides a clean interface integrated with a plethora of daily use productivity and development tools:

If GNOME isn't to your liking, though, there are other options. You can install any Fedora "spin" and install the software you need there also. Whatever you choose, you'll be ready to work in no time:

• download a Fedora image,
• install the tools you need,
• get to work!