[Mma] summary of GPL/open source scientific libraries?

Boud Roukema boud at astro.uni.torun.pl
Thu May 29 13:05:21 CEST 2003


Witam,

i'm forwarding this to MMA since it seems like a good, community-selected
list of scientific packages, that would be more useful in astronomical
observational and theoretical computing than closed and/or commercial
software.

Which ones are the best? Easiest to use? Best internationalised (i18n),
with Polish etc documentation? These are open questions.

In this course we started with octave, because Krzysztof G recommended
it, it's similar to matlab (commercial package), it's GPL and it seemed
good.

pozd
boud



> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 18:43:31 -0500
> From: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch, help-octave at bevo.che.wisc.edu
> Subject: Unidentified subject!
>
> Subject: [ANN] Quantian: A Knoppix remastering for Scientific Computing
> X-Mailer: VM 7.03 under 21.4 (patch 6) "Common Lisp" XEmacs Lucid
> FCC: /home/edd/mail/out/mail
> From: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>
> --text follows this line--

[ Apologies for cross-postings; however, this message is being sent only to
  lists to which I am personally subscribed and overlap should be small.
  Should your sense of netiquette be offended, please accept my apologies.
  That said, I would welcome pointers to other lists of interest for this
  posting and would encourage careful forwarding to related mailing lists. ]


	 Announcing the "Quantian Scientific Computing Environment"

		   A Knoppix / Debian variant tailored to
		     numerical and quantitative analysis

Quantian is a remastering of Knoppix, the self-configuring bootable cdrom
that turns any pc or laptop into a full-featured Linux workstation.  This
version is based on Knoppix 3.2 (2003-05-20), an earlier release based on
Knoppix 3.1 (2003-01-20) is still available; see below for URLs.

Quantian differs from Knoppix by adding a set of programs of interest to
applied or theoretical workers in quantitative or data-driven fields. The
added programs include

 o R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda,
   mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib), out-of-the box support for the
   powerful ESS modes for Emacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program
 o Octave with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk,
   matwrap and Inline::Octave
 o Maxima, including the x11 front-end and emacs support
 o the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) incl example binaries
 o the Pari/GP, Gap, Ginac and Yacas computer algebra systems
 o the Quantlib quantitative finance library incl. the Python interface
 o the OpenDX and Mayavi data visualization systems
 o TeXmacs for wysiwyg (La)TeX editing
 o and various other programs such apcalc, aribas, autoclass, euler, evolver,
   freefem, gambit, geg, geomview, glpk, gnuplot, gperiodic, gmt, gretl,
   lp-solve, mcl, multimix, rasmol, plotutils, pgapack, pspp, pdl, rcalc,
   yorick and xlispstat

while at the same time retaining programs and features already in Knoppix:

 o Auto-configuration of graphics, sound, disks, networking, auxiliary
   devices which is second to none among computer installations
 o The current version 3.1 of the KDE desktop environment
 o The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers
   in releases 2.95, 3.2 and 3.3 as well as gcj in version 3.2
 o Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, ...
 o The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as kate, joe, kate, nedit and zile
 o A complete teTeX TeX and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing
 o Gnumeric, Abiword, Koffice, ... office tools
 o a Swiss-army knife collection of networking tools allowing access
   to wired and wireless lans, covering ethernet, isdn or dial-up modems

In total, over 1200 Debian packages are included.

Quantian iso images are available at

	http://software.biostat.washington.edu/edd/quantian/
	http://franz.stat.wisc.edu/~edd/quantian/

and a Quantian overview page, including a recent paper, is at

	http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html

Plans for future versions are not set in stone but may entail support for
OpenMosix clustering.  Comments, questions, feedback are more than welcome!

 -- Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>  Wed, 28 May 2003 18:42:40 -0500

-- 
Don't drink and derive. Alcohol and analysis don't mix.



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