Hello, I am student and need in a pretty mathsoft. I do not want very much. I
almost found all, but is there any application for a symbolic integrating and
differentiating? I know a nice-looking and enough powerful MathCad for Win32.
It is very expensive one. But it is highly comfortable. Does anyone know an
analog (most diesired) or at least some application with these symbolic
capabilities? The most programs I see work with matrix and are linear algebra
oriented. But they cannot do symbolic calculations

Open source alternatives are Octave and Scilab.

I have not used it, but calc is open-source and runs right out of emacs. It is very powerful, and can handle symbolic computing. Here is a link to its user manual.

http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/calc/calc.html#SEC_Top

This may be more extensive. The manual is around 600 pages! This link also has tutorials

http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/gnu/calc/calc_toc.html

It can be downloaded from here. Version f is the most recent on that page.

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/calc/

http://mathomatic.orgserve.de/math/ (non-commercial; Mathomatic)
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/ (non-commercial; Maxima)

Sheng-Chieh

I tried both Octave and Scilab. Now I use Octave, but it does not fit for an
integrating or differentiating, i. e. I have found mention of them nowhere.

Just downloaded maxima it seems to be a great project!
mathomatic (303k) is far too smaller comparatively to the maxima
(8051k + 2642k), so think maxima is more appreciated.

Thank you for the calc link too, though I do not use emacs. However I'll
probably investigate it too.

Thank you very much.

The best program I've found for symbolic mathematics is Maple. The only down side is that it's very expensive (I only used it because my university has a site license for it).

As for free programs, none of the ones I've tried seemed all that great, but Maxima was the best of the bad lot for me.

I am looking at Scilab to see if it meets what I am looking for. Alternatives such as Octave etc are also possible, but for right now I am just getting started. I ran the ./configure for scilab and worked out most of the issues, but it is asking me for a X window. In reviewing the .in, log files etc it appears it needs an X11 emulator window.

I have a HP zv6000 laptop with an AMD Athlon 64 3800+. Can anyone advise a mirror, binary site, etc. that would have a good X11 window for this computer. Or if you know this is not the type of window I am looking for on the Scilab configure please let me know. Suggestions and help are always welcome.

Thanks,
MunichTexan

Please, do not try to ensure us SuSe does not provide an appropriate package
If you build source and it demands X11, then you should install (in YaST?) an
appropriate development RPM, I do not know how does it call in SuSe exactly,
somehow like x11-dev, xorg-dev or xfree86-dev or like.

ok, found /usr/X11R6/bin it was also set up in my $PATH so now I need to figure out what the configure file missed. :-)

No, configure wants to see /usr/include/X11 directory. If you hate RPMs and
installed X11 from source that directory must exist. But I dare to suggest you
have X11 from RPM, so install the appropriate devel RPM. In the previous post
I used -dev postfix, but it is wrong for SuSe. -devel is used for RPMs. I
just checked out which packeg provides /usr/X11R6/include/X11/X.h, the result
is x-dev. So, if you have x-devel package, I think it is what you need.

Continued looking at Scilab, op sys is Suse 10.0 on 64 bit. I installed the program using Yast and it has trouble seeing the alldems.dem file and library. It expects to see it in SCI/bin/alldems.dem but the file and library is in a different path. Is the best way to fix this problem to set up the path for the demo location through $PATH or is there a better way to set it up for Scilab.

Another question I have is on conversion of Matlab scripts into Scilab scripts. There are a set of programs available mfile2sci ==> macr2tree ==> tree2code which have apparently been written to convert Matlab scripts. I have looked through various documentation and am pulling a "newbie freeze". What is the syntax for calling and executing these functions? I attempted the exec "file" and "file" at the command lines inside SciLab but recieved errors.