Re: Mathematica and Windows
Hello Yigel,
You mention many important issues that the GNU/Linux community must
tackle in order to move into the desktop operating system space. Some
may claim that we are already there. I know that we are not, and it
may be a few more years until we finally get there, but when it
happens it will be like opening the flood gates. The fact that Debian
makes available 15,000 packages freely available is mind-boggling.
That is a lot of software (although, as you illustrate, a lot of it is
not exactly user-friendly and well-documented...yet). The OSDL just
started to provide direction (this month) so that we may get to the
point of providing a premier desktop OS.
The primary reason for the advanced state of mathematica and other
commercial software is indeed money. wolfram charges something like
$2,000 per copy of mathematica (likely much cheaper for students, you
have to phone them), and as such can employ a small army of
mathematicians and usability experts to make user-friendly code that
is ahead of the competition. We have precious few volunteers and rely
on the kindness of user feedback and contribution to make better code.
Hence we need your help. We don't want you to spend all your time
figuring out problems. If you are, you should spend more time posting
to debian-laptop, debian-user, etc. and use sites like
linuxquestions.org. If you have a particular problem and spend more
than an hour on it, I would search on google and other sites for
another hour, then ask for help. There are a lot of experienced users
out there ready and willing to help.
As a student, you should a have access to a UNIX computer lab (every
Physics department should have one because most scientific software is
written for UNIX platforms). On these lab systems, they should have
available software that their students need such as Mathematica,
Maple, MATLAB, etc. Because all UNIX environments use common
communication mechanisms (ssh, rsh, etc.) and graphical communication
(X), you can log in remotely to these systems and run the software as
if it resided locally on your system (without paying anything). Find
out the ip address for the system, then type "ssh -l <username> <ip
address>", then run your program "$ mathematica". also, if your
advisor has government grants, he can likely get you an account on
government hpc (high performance computing) resources which have
programs like mathematica available.
As for your problem with the modem, it is likely philosophical. Many
modems have their core algorithms run as a closed Windows binary
(winmodems), which for some reason we have not yet reverse engineering
or duplicated (or if so are prevented from distributing due to patents
or some other restriction). Hence, we can't include this code in a
free distribution. I would suggest checking out the SUSE distribution
because they do include and license certain proprietary components,
and may support your hardware. However most of the software that you
are interested in will not be packaged for SUSE (because they don't
have a collaboration of 1,000 packaging volunteers). the other
possibility is to buy a new pcmcia modem that you know is supported on
linux.
Anyway, I see that you're giving up. Please don't without a fight.
There are ways to accomplish your goals.
Good luck and best regards,
Mike Gilbert
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