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elmiX An Electron Microscopy Software Collection

for Data Analysis and Education
A. Reinholdt and T.E. Weirich
Gemeinschaftslabor fr Elektronenmikroskopie, RWTH Aachen, Ahornstr. 55,
D-52074 Aachen, Germany
reinholdt@gfe.rwth-aachen.de
Keywords: software, education, GNU/Linux live-CD

One major drawback in teaching processing and analysis of electron microscopy

data is the limited accessibility of software for students and lecturers outside an electron
microscopy laboratory. Commonly used software is generally commercial, the available
demo versions of these programs lack often for important program features. Suitable
alternatives of public domain or freeware programs are difficult to find or often do not
exist. Another disadvantage is the limitation that prominent EM software is usually
bound to a certain operating system. In order to bridge this gap we have compiled the
GNU/Linux live-CD elmiX based on the Debian sid distribution [1, 2, 3] for PCs with
Intel compatible CPUs (Pentium II and later) and at least 256 MB RAM. All programs
are available for immediate use with manuals and internet links to the web pages of the
respective authors after rebooting the PC from the CD. The current version of elmiX
(March 2008) contains the following electron microscopy software:
CASINO (D. Drouin) [4]
Crystal (M. Otten) [5]
CTF Explorer (M.V. Sidorov) [6]
Digital Micrograph (Gatan) [7]
EELS Model (J. Verbeeck) [8]
Electron Direct Methods (L. Marks & R. Kilaas) [9]
ImageJ (W. Rasband) [10]
Java Electron Crystallography Package (X.Z. Li) [11]
JEMS Student Edition (P. Stadelmann) [12]
Monte Carlo Simulations of electron-solid interactions (D. Joy) [13]
Powder Cell (W. Kraus, G. Nolze) [14]
Process Diffraction (J. Labar) [15]
Space Group Explorer (Calidris) [16]
VESTA (K. Momma, F. Izumi) [17]
For use in teaching and for exercises the elmiX software collection comes with a
number of GNU/Linux office programs (including PDF writing capability and printer
support), a browser for access to various web resources, a free and open source
multimedia and flash player and the unit converter tool NumericalChameleon [18]. So
far the live-CD contains only a few tutorials, scientific papers and sample files
distributed together with the programs. For future releases of the CD it is planned to
include material (lectures, tutorials, images, etc.) provided by the user community of

M. Luysberg, K. Tillmann, T. Weirich (Eds.): EMC 2008, Vol. 1: Instrumentation and Methods,
pp. 773774, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-85156-1_387, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

774

elmiX. The always latest version of the live-CD can be obtained as ISO-image from the
project web-site at http//:www.elmix.org
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http://www.gel.usherbrooke.ca/casino/index.html
M. Otten, private communication
http://clik.to/ctfexplorer
http://www.gatan.com/
http://webh01.ua.ac.be/eelsmod/eelsmodel.htm
http://www.numis.northwestern.edu/edm/
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/
http://www.unl.edu/CMRAcfem/XZLI/programs.htm
http://cimewww.epfl.ch/people/stadelmann/jemsSE/jemsSEv3_2710u2008.htm
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