[OLPC library] MATLAB for OLPC?

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero wrote:
> 
> 
> 2008/1/28 C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net <mailto:cscott at cscott.net>>:
> 
>     On Jan 28, 2008 5:24 PM, Ivan Krstić
>     <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu
>     <mailto:krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu>> wrote:
>      > On Jan 28, 2008, at 8:04 PM, Cleve Moler wrote:
>      > > (I doubt that MATLAB runs in the OLPC, but I'm not sure.)
> 
>     There are a number of open-source replacements for MATLAB, including
>     GNU Octave ( http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ ) and Maxima (
>     http://maxima.sourceforge.net/ ).
>      --scott
> 
>  
> 
> 
>     --
> 
> Another interesting open source math project also pointed as a 
> replacement of matlab is Sage
> *
> http://www.sagemath.org/**   *

My turn:

1. Both Maxima/XMaxima/wxMaxima and R run on my XO out of the box 
courtesy of "yum". With the Maximae, you get your choice of Lisp run 
times. I've successfully used both the clisp and SBCL runtimes. They do 
have a lot of dependencies, however, so watch your flash space.

2. Maxima is a Computer Algebra System and R is a graphical and 
statistical/numeric package. Both will do "number crunching", but 
they're two different beasts, and both fundamentally different beasts 
from Matlab.

3. There are two and a half "free Matlab clones". Someone mentioned 
Octave, but there is also Freemat, and a "half-free" package called 
SciLab. I call SciLab "half-free" because I don't know its exact 
license. You can download it freely, but I'm not sure all of the GPL 
freedoms are in place on it. I have used exactly none of these -- I 
learned R and don't see the need for another number cruncher.

4. On to Sage -- Sage is a wonderful package. It is written in Python 
and wraps many specialized and more general math packages. Its goal is 
to replace Mathematica, Maple, and some other less-well-known math 
packages. However -- it's huge. And it installs everything independently 
of whether you have the same package already as part of your distro.

I loaded it once, but there were only two or three rather specialized 
packages in Sage that weren't in my Gentoo repositories already. I think 
it's modular -- you don't have to load the whole enchilada. I might load 
the base on my virtual XO just to see how much space the core takes, 
because it's really an excellent collection.

If you can only load *one* math package, I highly recommend wxMaxima 
with the clisp run time. That's going to give you the most bang for your 
flash space. You don't really need XMaxima -- wxMaxima is a much better 
UI. By the way, wxMaxima also runs on Windows!!!!!!!!!!

Well ... so does R. In fact, the Windows UI for R is better than the 
core Linux UI. :)