Scientific Software options for Ubuntu

[samden]

Mendeley is closed source.

And drop all the dollar signs. Most of us are professionals and know you have to pay for stuff sometimes, it's not like money is evil or anything. Even open source developers have to be paid by someone somewhere along the line for something, or they'd starve.

You sound like a teenager who's just discovered open source software and are temporarily enthusiastic about it being the best thing ever in the whole wide world, while everything else is brewed from the faeces of Satan. But next month you'll forget it and be on to a new fad, maybe genetic engineering or nuclear power or something.

Teenagers.

[bondmatt]

www.caelinux.com

The latest release is 64bit Ubuntu (8.04 LTS). The focus for this package is mechanical/civil engineering. I think there is essentially one person responsible for this package. There are quite a few little tools included to make it easy to use.

It does look like ubuntusci would give this a run for its money but if your an engineer I think CAELinux is a little more interesting.

[Janneman27]

I am used to using Matlab on Windows Systems at work, but only have ubuntu systems at home. I need an alternative to matlab and have used Octave before (Windows version).

What is the most like Matlab, QtOctave or Scilab?

Any comments on usability?

[barnex]

I am used to using Matlab on Windows Systems at work, but only have ubuntu systems at home.

Matlab does run on linux (if you have the licence, that is). Otherwise, I personally like octave.

[bondmatt]

I think Scilab is a completely different program whereas Octave and Matlab and nearly identical (I think they both have very similar programming). QtOctave or XOctave are very similar to Matlab. Octave through a plain terminal can be a bit shocking at first. The standard text editor that comes with Ubuntu has Octave highlighting capabilities built in which is very nice. I really like that text editor.

Best regards,
- Matt Bondy

[Raamanaur]

What about considering the package gedit-latex-plugin as a LaTeX editor? I didn't go through all the thread so I'm sorry if someone already commented about it, but since I didn't see it in the first post I assume that's not the case. I'm currently using this editor and I think it's a great option for Gnome users since it weights only 2MB compared to almost 200MB for Lyx and around 650MB for Kile.

[kordenal]

Hello Gurus.
Can anybody help me - how to re-calculate all Maxima's formulas in TexMacs document?

Thanx...

[superarthur]

Well, many scientists who are willing to share their software share them in source code and linux binary only.
One example is HMMER, a sequence homology search software using Hidden Markov Model
http://hmmer.janelia.org/

[Azrael3000]

What about considering the package gedit-latex-plugin as a LaTeX editor? I didn't go through all the thread so I'm sorry if someone already commented about it, but since I didn't see it in the first post I assume that's not the case. I'm currently using this editor and I think it's a great option for Gnome users since it weights only 2MB compared to almost 200MB for Lyx and around 650MB for Kile.

seconded.

Another good bib tool is JabRef. Can be found in the repos and is based on Java.

[rajn]

Python especially - its scientific packages Scipy, Numpy. There are options to integrate it with C++ or Fortran.

Even better: SAGE integrates python, and other software which also includes symbolic math alternatives.