The BALL suite for structural biology has an enormous flexibility in its field of applications. There are so many, that a single group, or even collaborating groups like the ones behind BALL, cannot provide all the possible tools that would come handy to prepare the input for BALL or to further interpret its output. The Debian community provides a nice environment, very useful already, and we are happy to have further contributed to it. The maintainer of this package is from BALL's upstream development team (http://www.ballview.org). The Debian-Med community (http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org) jumps in to lower the entry barriers a bit. We all are very open towards new experiences and ideas about what the distribution of BALL with Debian/Ubuntu might bring or has brought for structural bioinformatics. If there are workflows (interactions with other tools in Debian-Med) you are now experimenting with that were previously too tedious to prepare or an increased accessibility of distributed computing (clusters, clouds, ...?) then please drop us a note. Andreas Hildebrandt (on behalf of the BALL developers) and Steffen Moeller (on behalf of Debian-Med) Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:38:45 +0200