>>  We have asked may times for volunteers to help us put all of those
>>  scientific applications into SL.  The only thing we ever get is "please
>>  put in so.and.so".  We do not get "Yes, I will help you put in these
>>  scientific applications".
>>


 	Ok, I'll bite :)

 	I've made IRAF and other astronomy apps rpms for el5. The repo is 
in
 	http://cosmos.astro.uson.mx/~favilac/downloads/IRAF/el5/

 	Just install this file and you are good to go:
 	astro-uson.repo-1.0-1.el5.uson.noarch.rpm

 	The problem of making this kind of rpms, are dependencies.
 	When I made the repo, i had to build some python apps that weren't 
on the official repos, or in rpmforge but now they are starting to 
appear in them, so there's a little chance of problems down the road from 
cross-dependencies.

 	I'll try to add more apps later, but i won't give an ETA on it ;)