BioSLAX

BioSLAX is a Live CD, Live DVD, and Live USB operating system (OS) comprising a suite of more than 300 bioinformatics tools and application suites. It has been released by the Bioinformatics Resource Unit of the Life Sciences Institute (LSI), National University of Singapore (NUS) and is bootable from any PC that allows a CD/DVD or Universal Serial Bus (USB) boot option and runs the compressed Slackware flavour of the Linux OS, also known as Slax. Slax was created by Tomáš Matějíček in the Czech Republic using the Linux Live Scripts which he also developed. The BioSLAX derivative was created by Mark De Silva, Lim Kuan Siong, and Tan Tin Wee.

BioSLAX was first released to the NUS Life Science Curriculum in April 2006.

In January 2003, APBioNet received a research grant from the Pan Asia Networking (PAN) Programme of IDRC (Canada) to build an APBioBox of commonly used bioinformatics applications and packages with grid-computing software as part of its effort to build an APBioGrid. The platform chosen was the then ubiquitous Redhat Linux. In March of that same year, APBioNet launched an industry partnership scheme (AIPS) and partnered with Sun Microsystems to build BioBox for the Solaris platform. Six months later, beta versions of APBioBox and Sun's biobox, now named Bio-Cluster Grid were released for beta testing among selected parties. The packages included Globus Grid Toolkit Version 2.0 and Sun Grid Engine respectively.

On 4 December 2003, the biobox software packages then named APBioBox (Redhat Linux) and BioCluster Grid (Sun Solaris) were field-tested at a Bioinformatics Workshop was conducted at the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI), Department of Science and Technology (DOST), Philippines on the occasion of the 70th Anniversary of the National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP). Ten pentium machines and a couple of Sun servers were successfully inducted into the APBioGrid. This Workshop and the software tested were sponsored by Sun Microsystems and partly funded by IDRC.

In July 2004, Dr. Derek Kiong introduced Knoppix as a stable, powerful and small Unix (Debian-based) platform to A/Prof Tan Tin Wee in a workshop organised by the Institute of Systems Science (ISS), NUS. By September 2004, through Mr. Ong Guan Sin, they were able to create a Knoppix remaster template by building software in APBioBox plus useful applications into a prototype, APBioKnoppix, as a project for the practical course of LSM2104 module of the Department of Biochemistry, NUS. It was later upgraded based on Knoppix 4.02 and released as APBioKnoppix2. While APBioKnoppix was widely used, it was found that it was not easily expandable. All applications had to be in place before remastering, which made the distribution very inflexible.

In June 2005, Mr. Mark De Silva of the Bioinformatics Resource Unit of the Life Sciences Institute (LSI), suggested using Slax as a base for a new bio-based live CD due to its modular system, which effectively allowed for the same base system to be used and various tools or changes to be included on top of the base easily by adding single modules with all application files or changes. This eliminated the need to remaster the entire system every time new software or changes emerged, which was the case for Knoppix.

By April 2006, the first version of BioSLAX was released with several editions:

BioSLAX was subsequently used in the bioinformatics teaching module within NUS under the Life Science Curriculum as well as in several events that were organized under the umbrella of the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet). APBioNet is a regional affiliate of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Customized versions were built to cater for both NUS and APBioNet.