Hi lists,
Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> I'm forwarding this to the d-science list, where this stuff is often discussed.
>
> On 13/05/2008, Jimmy Wu <jimmywu013+debian@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Has anyone here ever used the "Grapher" application that all Macs come with?
>> It is a very nice piece of software with support for 3D and many types
>> of equations, and it's very useful for math/science purposes. Is
>> there something comparable for Debian or Linux in general? I was
>> looking on Google but couldn't find any convincing replacements. Most
>> of the stuff I see is very rudimentary 2D graphers that only allow a
>> very limited amount (like 3) equations. I saw labplot, but I didn't
>> try that because I don't want all the KDE dependencies (which, as an
>> xfce user, means a lot of extra packages).
>> I also gnuplot, which seems to be decent except it doesn't have the
>> nice friendly GUI of mac's grapher. Neither of these are great as
>> substitutes, but I haven't found anything better.
>>
>> So basically, I was wondering if anyone had any ideas before I go
>> invest the time into learning how to use gnuplot?
Let me put in a plug for ROOT. It's a (huge) piece of software used
mostly by the HEP community, but no reason that others shouldn't be able
to use it. There are not yet official Debian packages (except in
experimental), but unofficial ones can be obtained from
http://mirror.phy.bnl.gov/debian-root/ . The plan is to upload official
packages of ROOT version 5.18 in time for them to end up in Lenny.
It might not be exactly what you are looking for in terms of
user-friendliness, but if you are somewhat familiar with C++ or Python
(it has bindings for both) it can be learned pretty quickly and is very
powerful. See for instance this page: http://root.cern.ch/root/soeren/
or the big tutorial at http://root.cern.ch/root/Tutorials.html .
Just to give you an idea of what can be done, one can type "root" on the
command-line and then run the following code within ROOT's C++
interpreter to get a nice 3D plot of the function f(x,y) = sin x sin y
in the range x in (-10, 10), y in (-10, 10).
TF2 func("func", "sin(x)*sin(y)", -10, 10, -10, 10);
func.Draw("surf4");
There are many, many options for controlling the appearance of the
resulting plot.
Or if you prefer Python over C++, you can instead (after installing the
libroot-python-dev package) start up the Python interpreter and type
into it:
import ROOT
func = ROOT.TF2("func", "sin(x)*sin(y)", -10, 10, -10, 10)
func.Draw("surf4")
I think the existing unofficial packages were built against python 2.4,
so you'd have to install and run that version of Python explicitly, but
the forthcoming official ones will use python 2.5.
ROOT also has Ruby bindings but I'm not familiar with that language.
If Christian Holm (the package maintainer) is around on this mailing
list, he might have more to say about ROOT.
best regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@gmail.com>
WWW: http://www.starplot.org/
WWW: http://people.debian.org/~kmccarty/
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