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Here's an OK GUI for Octave that is still maintained: Octave UPM where UPM = Technical University of Madrid. Don't worry, the website is in Spanish but the program has an English version.

But about all these slapped-on GUIs, the Octave FAQ says

None of the GUIs for Octave that have been developed thus far are part of Octave and there is a reason for it. All of them fail at a very important point, integration with Octave. They treat Octave as a foreign black box using pipes for communication, an approach that is bound to eventually fail. This includes QtOctave (now abandoned and incompatible with newer versions of Octave) [...] it will never be stable

So I'm really looking forward to an integrated solution.

Please write textscan. Many people will love you for it

You should check out Octave and Maxima. I just recently completed a course in discreet control engineering used these two programs extensively, they were both extremely useful.

Octave, I think, still needs lots of improvements in the plotting department, but it's amazing how much functionality it has. Maxima's great for inverting symbolic matrices.. :) Python is of course becoming a very popular free replacement for Matlab as well.

There's an OSS Matlab clone called GNU Octave, see http://www.octave.org/. It's mostly compatible with Matlab. I've been using it for handling larger datasets or maths-heavy stuff. Works fine. --Bud

Have you looked at octave? I haven't used it (or Matlab, either) much myself, but it's meant to be an open-source Matlab work-alike. If you're looking for matching syntax, this is probably a good bet.

Pretty good math sofware and open source too: Octave home page. It's been around quite a while, and it's largely compatible with Matlab.

Stuck with matlab? You might want to give GNU Octave a try, its a free clone of Matlab. http://www.octave.org/

There's an excellent open-source MATLAB clone called Octave. I've used it for a lot of real-world physics work in my lab. Worth checking out before you shell out for MATLAB.

Depending on how you're using it, you could replace Matlab with GNU Octave.

Avoiding proprietary dependencies (especially expensive ones like Matlab) is generally a good idea.

According to this page the scientific benchmark offers a mixed result. Although ScienceMark seems to be well-designed it's Windows-only and closed source. I'd be interested to see some open, Linux-oriented benchmarks. I wrote a very simple one called obench.m which uses Octave running off a live Quantian 0.7.9.1 CD, it might be interesting to get some numbers from it (I have timed some Pentiums, Athlons and Opterons).

FYI, some of the stuff you can do in Matlab, you can also do in GNU Octave (which, IIRC, started out as a Matlab clone -- its syntax is largely compatible with Matlab's) just as easily.

Molecular Physicists/Computational Chemists have made available through a variety of open licenses, including GPL, highly complex, well-developed, robust simulation codes. We're undoubtedly a smaller niche than MechE's, but we have a good couple dozen solid production codes to choose from (if you mix the quantum people and the classical MD people), for between Free (beer/speech) to Freeish (moderate license fee, or restrictions on code redistribution).

Maybe the problem is cultural: people who can write such software, write it for money. There isn't enough money in electronic structure packages, so at least half of them remain free. The money that's charged is frequently to cover duplication costs, and to chase off dilettants.

Maybe the bigger problem is the parent poster is expecting a level of user-obsequiousness from his software. Most of my community's free codes are somewhere between User-Indifferent to User-Surly, but you get used to the ones that are relevant to your own work rather quickly.

However, I would list Octave http://www.octave.org/ and OpenDX http://www.opendx.org/ as good starting places for tools. That will get you a good programming environment, and an absolutely killer visualization framework.

http://octave.org/ i suggest you get the cvs version. most matlab scripts will just work, unless they're mex files (in which case you're s.o.l.). that makes a lot of the packages you mentioned at least possible.

as for the meat of your question, i suggest you try to write one of the pieces of software you mentioned --- the exact reasons for why they're hard to find in general will become apparent pretty quickly.

Gnuplot. Gri. R w/ gnuplot. Octave w/ gnuplot. Asymptote with LaTeX. etc. etc.

I produced many, many, many data analyses and so forth along with heavy scientific charting requirements using tools like that finishing up my chemistry degree. (Gnuplot and octave in particular I got a lot of mileage out of.)

Most of those should be able to export the graphs from your analyzed data into something like a png, eps, etc. that you can then embed in your word-processing program's report/paper document.

Frankly, as a scientist, Word kind of sucks, and Excel is a really shitty platform for data analysis for anything more complex than sophmore-level undergrad labs. At the least, using a dedicated analysis and charting tool or set of tools is like a breath of fresh air after dealing with Excel's cramped, business-oriented data toolset.

If you're running into the limits of Excel, then my advice to you is this: learn to program. Get Octave or, better yet, Scilab. If you need performance, you can use C or C++. I don't know why people use Excel for serious number crunching.

octave is a free clone of matlab. http://www.octave.org/ it is compatible with most matlab scripts...

How about GNU octave? Mathworks hosed our university site licence. I switched to octave and haven't had a problem runing any of my Matlab code.

http://www.octave.org/

Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab (the big 3 for commercial mathematics software) are probably a little on the high powered side for high school. That's not to say high school students couldn't learn a lot from using them, merely that the price tag for such software just isn't going to be justified by the usage.

You can get similar stuff for free in Octave and Maxima. Neither are as complete as the 3 mentioned, but then I doubt many high school students will be using Maple's ability to generate the Galois group of a polynomial. Octave and Maxima (and R for Statistics) should be enough for most high school level work.

As an off topic note, Maple for Linux really hasn't been as well maintained as the Windows version in the last few releases, and has tended to be slower/buggier (at least in the GUI interface department). I'd suggest Mathematica would be a better bet under the circumstances.

Jedidiah.

What educational software packages are available for Linux?

I'm not sure what you're looking for exactly, but off the top of my head (and a little freshmeat help):

Primary school level: Gcompris is great, has a large bundle of games targetting everything from spelling to geography to math, and is easily extensible.

Astronomy: Both Celestia and Stellarium provide great tools for teaching kids of all levels about our universe.

Mathematics: You can use basic spreadsheets if you like, but there's also Octave for vector and matrix mathematics and Maxima (and several others that I can't recall right now) for symbolic algebra.

Chemistry: There's stuff like Ghemical and Gperiodic which aren't half bad for exploring various chemistry concepts. Then there's stuff like GenChemLab which is pretty neat.

Physics: There's physics simulation software like Physics3D , and there are others around if you care to look.

Computing: Well, you've got all the programming tools you want, but also things like DrPython to make it easier/fun for students (even at lower school levels).

General knowledge: Wikipedia is accessible from anywhere.

Okay, there's a science bias there, but it's not a bad start for what I can think of, or find in 2 minutes of freshmeat.

Jedidiah.

Couldn't they pick an name that wasn't in use already?

GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations.

I use Gimp to do what most people do with Photoshop: General Image Manipulations.
I am not a Photographer or a full-time Graphics Designer (although I love hand-drawing and designing Logos)
What I don't like about Photoshop is not the software itself but the OS : modal windows.

Gimp (and most apps in Linux) - you have that freedom of floating dialog boxes instead of Modal-windows; so you can get under it.

The general averseness with Gimp is twofold:

1. People are way too accustomed to Photoshop and unlearning stuff is short of painful.
2. Gimp on Windows/Cygwin sucks sucks badly. And sadly that is Windows-users gain their first impressions of the software.

In Gimp if you are stuck - right click (navigate the menu from thereon to do almost anything).
Gimp is definitely better what it used to be (I abhored the 1.x versions), and not that sub-standard in comparison to Photoshop.
I don't deny however that Photoshop itself is an extremely professional state-of-the-art software and that in many fronts it still beats Gimp (as I keep hearing: CMYK / Pantone profiles).
But there is much more to Gimp than people are vaguely aware.

For me its refreshing and exciting the whole evolutionary (if not revolutionary) process. Sure many Linux-ported applications are still sub-par in contrast to Windows-only:

Photogenics, MainActor, QCad / LinuxCad

Some got the timing wrong and had to pull-out as Linux wasn't popular then: NetObjects Fusion for Linux and MusicMatch Jukebox.
Others were bullied by the Microsoft lobby: most notably games.
While others still support a Linux version to this date: Maya Complete and Mathematica (way too expensive I rather settle for the free Blender, Octave and Pov-Ray)

Which leads us to the Open Source:

The were have a vast library of resources just to cater for the Designer.
But sadly we got tired and old in learning new stuff.

I cannot comment on the world of Mac. Which should be more user-oriented than developer-oriented; a means to an end as you stated.

While Microsoft itself - is a damn pain in the arse. People are stucked with it for lock-in reasons including proprietory formats - that is how they bred so many software houses writing apps just for it.
Rebooting, desinfecting - recovering corrupted documents is a hassle any business and I could do without. And so .. I resist.

Use Mac / Use Linux / but using Microsoft = very unwise.

The gimp is scriptable, it's called "gimp batch mode".

FFT and stuff can be handled by GNU octave or freemat, both use the same language as matlab, and run on fortran. As of compatibility, there is basic compatibility, because I was able to do my homework with octave, that I was supposed to do with Matlab at the lab.

Tax 0.1 for Octave

Open Tax Solver

There's two. Would you like more.

statistics:
R http://www.r-project.org/
WinBugs http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/winbugs/contents .shtml

symbolic mathematics:
Maxima http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

numerics:
Octave http://www.octave.org/
Scilab http://scilabsoft.inria.fr/
g95 (Fortran 95 compiler)http://www.g95.org/

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

Call that a link?

Octave

That, my friend, is a link.

Octave - Matlab minus the GUI and extra toolboxes
Macaulay 2 - advanced algebra
GAP - general algebra

C'mon hax0r people - no-one needs another web server / window manager. I'm missing an OS replacement for Mathemetica. One would think this would be of high priority to the OS community...

Mathematica is available on Linux.
There is also Octave for the Maple fans.

I have to agree with the parent post about Excel's graphing abilities. For quick and easy data plots, Excel beats every other open-source product. I mentioned this point in a post here awhile ago. For example:

Gnumeric - It can plot data points, but how about the linear regression on the same curve? Nope. Sure, you could get Gnumeric to calculate the regression and hack a regression line as another dataset on the plot, but what happens when you want to modify a single data point? You gotta do it all over again.

OpenOffice - OO is one step ahead of Gnumeric in that it supports placing the regression line on the data plot itself, but it doesn't have the option to also put the line's equation on the graph. Again, sure, you can separately calculate the regression and tack it onto the graph, but that's just annoying.

Don't get me wrong. For the most part, I hate Microsoft Office. I type pratically all my documents in LaTeX (through lyx-qt and texmacs) and stun my TAs with the clarity of the resulting reports. It's just that open-source programs need to address fundamental issues like this before they will become mainstream.

Oh, and for the critics. Yes, I know and love gnuplot, but processing data in Octave and exporting via gnuplot is nowhere as fast or as easy as using Excel to crunch the numbers and produce the plot all at once.

Other tools which I have come across, but haven't really worked with: Axiom (symbolic computations, CAS); Scigraphica (graphing); opendx (data explorer + visualization).

I've actually never really used R (by the time I came across it, I was done with my physics labs), so I can't really compare any of the others to it. But it definitely looks like one of the tools that I should add to my suite.

Does anyone have any insight on how this differs from octave?

This is the first I've heard of R, but I've tried using octave a few times. It seems to be a sort of enhanced gnuplot. I was thinking about using it for a project I'm working on, though I may just stick with good 'ol C for performance.

Do any of these projects work well with sparse matricies? I'm interested in using them to run a pagerank-like computation, but not if they use n^2 memory.

-jim

Mathematica is nice, but if you're cheap (raises hand), try Octave. Some plotting capability, including histograms.

Or go get Octave which is an open source Matlab like languange...

They may not be able to afford MATLAB, but instead, they can use octave!
http://www.octave.org/

John W. Eaton, developer of GNU Octave. John has been developing the project for over a decade and has produced a serious rival to Matlab for numerical computation. All scientists and engineers should be aware of Octave.

You do realize that MatLab runs in Linux if you're willing to licence it, which it seems you are under windows...

Anyway, a quick freshmeat search showed me that Nulab, Yorick, Scilab, FrAid and Lush are all possible replacements, depending on the application. Moreover, many of those refer to Octave which might be suitable, depending on your needs.

Likewise National Instruments makes LabVIEW for Linux, and freshmeat says to look at Flow Designer and TACO as potential free replacements.

If the two are used for related purposes, then consider RobotFlow which came as a result under both searches...

Just in case you decide to retry the system at a later date...

I have yet to see any program, free or non-free, compare to Dreamweaver.
Quanta really isn't bad.

Visual Studio is the best development suite I've used.
I'm hooked on Anjuta. Others may prefer KDevelop.

Or Matlab.
Octave completely replaced the casual use of this for me.

Mathworks Matlab: $1900 Commercial Use
Octave

here are a few good math programs:
Scilab, Octave, r-project, And for making webpages emacs works great ;)

I'm not a mathematician, so I really don't know, but does Maxima compare well to Mathematica and does Octave compare well to Matlab? I'm really curious how a side-by-side comparison of these packages looks like by those who used them.

1. Excel is an extremely poor tool for doing anything other than basic graphs and calculations. For engineering purposes, it's near useless.

Don't forget Octave, a Matlab-like but free data analysis/plotting program. It can directly run most of what you've already programmed for Matlab.

Actually, I'm not sure now. I was using a thing from an unofficial Debian KDE 3.2 package (I think), which was in the KDE utilities menu. I just checked on another machine with konstruct-compiled kde 3.2; you're right, it only has a "scientific calculator" and the sqrt button is indeed missing.

Well, I don't use these things anyway -- typing is so much faster than pushing buttons, I just use either "bc -l" or octave and have instant access to much more sophisticated math.

Wouldn't dream of it. Octave all the way.

Due to work reasons, I have to use a number of numerical packages, such as Octave, GNU R (I don't feel like typing URLs; use google), python, and other stuff (like yacas, maxima, lyx/latex, GRASS...). For these purposes, Quantian is a superb Knoppix remaster. With some work files on a USB keyring (or on a website), I have my own personalised desktop to carry around. And I can do OpenMosix as well, should the need arise!

See GNU Octave and Scilab.

See GNU Octave and Scilab.