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MIT OCW certainly is a start. The lectures will certainly help a lot in ways the textbook could not.

Then for reading material you could use some or all of these (if you like it chewed up for you):

http://www.jirka.org/ra/

http://www.webskate101.com/webnotes/home.htmld/home.html

http://www.trillia.com/zakon-analysisI.html

If you can deal with non linear information even Wikipedia has very extensive articles on Analysis. You can start from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_analysis

Or MathWorld:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/classroom/Analysis.html

I think a combination of tools might be the answer. I use maxima (wxmaxima frontent) when I need a cas. I use my own software Genius when I need to compute something numerically, and I often use it for in-class demonstrations (I often end up implementing whatever it is I need at some particular point). I can't remember when I last used octave, but that also sometimes happens when tehre's something genius can't do. I tried to make the interface to genius friendly, though of course there's always plenty of room for improvement. Generally it's a "command line" type interface, but I think it can do some pretty graphs. Too friendly tools generally end up being not very flexible. So it is worth it to spend a bit of time learning the less friendly ones.

By the way, I am getting ready to make a new genius release this weekend, I have just one more thing to do on my list before a release.

Well .. you should do your part marketing free alternatives. Tell your professors about free (or reasonably priced) textbooks. It might be that they do not know about them! Good places to start:

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jmg336/html/mathematics.html
http://www.ebyte.it/library/refs/Refs_Math_Books.html
http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html

I'll also again plug my own two free textbooks :) http://www.jirka.org/ra/ and http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/

Jiri

Well .. you should do your part marketing free alternatives. Tell your professors about free (or reasonably priced) textbooks. It might be that they do not know about them! Good places to start:

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jmg336/html/mathematics.html
http://www.ebyte.it/library/refs/Refs_Math_Books.html
http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html

I'll also again plug my own two free textbooks :) http://www.jirka.org/ra/ and http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/

Jiri

That's why we need free DRM-free books. As a college textbook writer you do NOT make much money. Only in the very rare cases when your book is a very low level book for a course taken by most students and happens to be picked by many colleges. There are VERY FEW authors making money on college textbooks. The publishers on the other hand make a lot of money, keep changing editions, etc... Most professors that wrote a textbook made almost no money on it, and essentially donated time that they could have spent advancing their career (doing research) and getting a raise. So writing a textbook can generally be a financial downside.

The trick would be to make more professors aware of the idea of free books just like free software. Then publishers would only get to charge for actual added value.

It's true I made my two books (http://www.jirka.org/ra/ and http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/ ) use the NC (noncommercial) clause, but I may be persuaded in the future to drop it. I wouldn't mind not getting any royalties for a reasonably priced version, but I right now want to retain that control.

Or of course, they could just use free (as in freedom and price) CC licensed textbooks. I wrote two such undergraduate textbooks:

http://www.jirka.org/ra/
http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/

That should save some money. Both are classes where a traditional textbook is $100 or so

Or of course, they could just use free (as in freedom and price) CC licensed textbooks. I wrote two such undergraduate textbooks:

http://www.jirka.org/ra/
http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/

That should save some money. Both are classes where a traditional textbook is $100 or so

This may be a bit more advanced than you are looking for, but I do have a free online differential equations textbook if you need:

http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/

I've seen this but haven't yet used it. It seems pretty cool:

Genius Math Tool

About encrypted filesystems on Linux:

• From memory, the MS system has a mechanism for key recovery and/or an admin back-door. This makes sense in an office situation (e.g someone leaves or is fired) but it still leaves me wondering about other backdoors. It doesn't sound like paranoid-tinfoil-hat-crowd level encryption to me.
• dm-crypt was introduced in kernel 2.6.4. This uses the new device-mapper API to encrypt a file or device. From what I've read, it's a much cleaner implementation than cryptoloop.

Unfortunately there is no in-filesystem encryption, yet. It's still a little clunky to encrypt a whole filesystem at a time. It'd be much more efficient to be able to mark a directory (and all its children) as being encrypted with a certain key. I believe some people are working on this, so we might see it eventually.

About virtual terminals: I gather that most distros now use gdm, kdm, or even good old xdm to provide an all-graphical login. None of this clunky startx stuff. Much more prettier looking as well :)

About user switching: I think KDE recently (last year?) added a "switch user" feature. I'm a Gnome user, so I'm not really sure. I know I've seen it recently, but I can't find it in the Gnome foot menu here. So it's probably in KDE.

Xnest :1 -geometry 1024x768 -query localhost

Presuming that Xnest is included in your X installation and you are running a display manager (kdm, gdm or xdm for example), this will open a 1024x768 window and display a login prompt within it. You can then log in (either as the same user or as a completely different user) and use a web browser on a 1024x768 screen even though your screen is 2560x2048.

My sister-in-law uses this to see what the pages in her forthcoming web site would look like to someone browsing at that res. Her comment on 640x480 was "What is this? A thumbnail?" (-:

In short, why bother being merely as good as MS-Windows? As well as doing everything that it does, we should take note of useful things which are easy for us and impossible for the convicted monopolist.

With Xnest, as well as opening a session at a different resolution, you can also open one at a different depth. If the hardware supports it, it will be done directly otherwise it will be emulated. You can see how horrid you app looks in 16 colours, greyscale or black-and-white. If the Xnest session is larger than your physical screen, you can scroll around and see it all in chunks as big as your hardware allows.

If you want to put an MS-Windows session on your screen rdesktop 1.3 or later does full RDPv5 protocol, all depths and resolutions (plus sound, if you don't mind kissing your bandwidth farewell). If you want a copy of someone else's screen, use x2x. If you want to display stuff at a resolution or depth which you don't have, or in batch without toucing your video hardware, use Xv - take 4096x4096 screenshots on your S3-Virge-equipped machine, knock yourself out. Or use Xvnc and display to a VNC client only. And so on. I'm waiting for Xrdp to appear. (-:

WRT to GDM not supporting auto logins, check the Reference Manual and search for "AutomaticLogin", "AutomaticLoginEnable", and "TimedLogin".