Scientific Software

[larry]

Dear All,
Although the scientific software in Ubuntu is not exceedingly old, it would be nice to be able to install easily the newer version released during the 6 months between one release of Ubuntu and the following one.
I am mainly concerned about Maxima, Octave, R, Scilab (the most widespread tools).
Regards
Larry

[andlinux21]

wow i was wondering about some science tools i downloading KStars but i wanted like the chemstry and electronic tools thanks for the post I will try to download those tomorrow.

[Mattias]

I'll second the first post and I would like to add Scigraphica to the list
//Mattias

[ssam]

there is a list of apps at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuScientists

it used to link to pages with some more info about some of them, but i the wiki has all moved around a bit.

sam

[larry]

Hi guys,
Please do not take this as a bitter complain --far from it--but has anything been uploaded in the backport repositories? I allowed all of them (apart from bleeding) in my repository list, but my system does not find any scientific program to update.
Cheers
Larry

[David Valentine]

Just thought I'd mention that I, too, am interested in this genre. SciGraphica v. 2.10 looks impressive, but I can only find v. 0.8.0-9 in the repositories.

[towsonu2003]

/me agrees
but /me did not have time to learn them yet (writing thesis w/ spss, hate it).

[Viro]

Why does everyone in the open source community insist that Octave and Scilab are Matlab 'alternatives'? No one who ever uses Matlab for any serious work will consider Octave at all. That's not because of the lack of a decent IDE, profiling tools, or documentation. These aren't show stoppers.

The biggest problem facing Octave is speed. In anything but the most trivial code, Octave is about 50x - 1000x slower than Matlab. So what will take Matlab an hour to do will take Octave 50 hours to do, at the best! Given such poor performance, Octave is not an 'alternative' to Matlab, if you want to get any work done a timely manner.