What is it?

Debian GNU/Linux — or simply “Debian” — is an operating system. An operating system is the “central” software in a computer, on top of which all the other applications will run. Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X are two well known proprietary operating systems.

Debian GNU/Linux has two fundamental differences with these proprietary operating systems:

• Debian GNU/Linux is a free software (think of free as in freedom, not as in free beer). This means that the software included in Debian can be freely used, modified and redistributed by anyone. Incidentally, this means that Debian can be downloaded for free. Debian is developed by a community of thousands of developers and users which work cooperatively, mainly through the Internet. Some are volunteers, some are academics, others work for companies which have understood the technical and strategic interest of free software. The free software community resembles the scientific community in many ways: both share the goal of contributing to the common good, and both routinely pratice sharing of ideas and products to reach that goal.

• Debian GNU/Linux is an operating system, but it is also much more than that: it is a collection of several dozens of thousands of softwares. No need to go through several websites to get an office suite from there, a web browser from there, a numerical computing environment from another place, and to familiarize yourself with various installation procedures. With Debian, all these pieces of software, and many more, are freely accessible with a few clicks from a uniformized dowload interface (the package manager, see below).

Among all these pieces of software, many are directly useful for the researcher in economics. Actually, all the sofware that an economist needs for its daily job are in Debian, whether for producing theoretical or quantitative results or for communicating these results through article or presentation typesetting.

The objective of the present endeavour is to provide a easy way for researchers and students to try free software. This is done by providing a pre-installed virtual machine image, so there is no need to repartition your hard drive.

These Debian images were created by SébastienVillemot.

Get it

Download the virtual machine image

You need to know if your system is 32-bit or 64-bit. If unsure, choose 32-bit.

Also, you have the choice between English and French.

Beware, the image is big, around 2.5Gb.

Install Virtualbox

Download and install Virtualbox (version 4) on your system.

Configure the virtual machine in Virtualbox

Run Virtualbox. Then, click “Import appliance” in the “File menu”. Choose the Debian image that you downloaded (it has the .ova extension). Then you will be prompted for various settings of the virtual machine: if unsure, just accept the defaults.

Your Debian machine should now appear in the list of virtual machines. Just double click it to run it!

Customize the keyboard layout

The English image is pre-configured with an American QWERTY keyboard, and the French image is pre-configured with a French AZERTY keyboard.

If you are using a different layout, go to the “System” menu on the top of the screen, then go to “Preferences” and then “Keyboard”. Click on the “layout” tab, and choose your favourite layout from the list. Back to the list of installed layouts, delete the layout that you don’t use.

Access your hard drive from the virtual machine

You will probably want to be able to access your main hard drive from the virtual machine. Here is how to do that:

• Shut down your virtual machine
• Select the Debian machine from the main Virtualbox window
• Click on the “Settings” button
• Select the “Shared folders” tab
• Create a new shared folder by clicking on the button with a plus sign
• Choose the folder that you want to be accessible from your virtual machine. Make it auto-mount and persistent

Your shared folder will be accessible at the next reboot of your virtual machine. It will appear under the /media directory: you can access it by double-clicking on the “Computer” icon on your desktop, then double-click “File system”, and finally double-click “media”.

List of applications

The image comes with many pre-installed software. The following is a non-exhaustive list of useful applications for an economist.

Numerical and symbolic computations

• Octave: numerical computing environment, clone of MATLAB
• Scilab: another numerical computing environment
• Maxima: symbolic computing environment

Statistics, econometrics, modelling

• R: powerful programming language with lots of stats and econometrics packages
• Gretl: user-friendly econometric software
• Dynare: economic modelling platform

Typesetting, office

• OpenOffice.org: office suite, similar to Microsoft Office

• LyX: frontend to LaTeX, similar to Scientific Word
• Texmaker: powerful LaTeX editor
• Jabref: bibliographic references database

Internet

• Iceweasel: web browser, rebranded version of Mozilla Firefox
• Epiphany: another web browser
• Empathy: instant messaging client
• Evolution: e-mail client, similar to Microsoft Outlook

Multimedia

• Gimp: powerful image editor, similar to Photoshop
• Rhythmbox: music player

Programming in C, C++, Fortran, Python

• gcc: C compiler
• g++: C++ compiler
• gfortran: Fortran compiler
• Python interpreter
• Anjuta: integretad development environment (IDE)
• Codeblocks: another IDE
• Emacs: the self-extensible editor

Documentation

Double-click the “Debian Documentation” icon on the desktop to get access to many documentation entry points.

Getting more

You can search and install more software by running the Synaptic Package Manager accessible from the “System->Admnistration” menu.

Going further

If you like Debian (and I am sure you will!), you may want to install it more permanently on your computer. This is typically done by repartitioning your hard drive so that Debian can live next to your proprietary operating system. You choose which one to use at boot time. This setup is called dual-boot.

Go to the Debian installation page, and download an image of the Debian installer (to be put on a CD or on a USB stick). Then boot your computer using the newly created installation medium.

During the installation process, you will be offered the possibility of shrinking your proprietary operating so that Debian can live next to it.

After the installation, you will get a “fresh” desktop install, without the economist-specific software. But you can easily install them through the package manager.

Related efforts

If you're interested in a ready-to-use Debian image focused towards high performance computing, you may want to try PelicanHPC.