Re: mac grapher for linux
On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@debian.org> wrote:
> 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/
> GPG: public key ID 4F83C751
Thank you to everyone for your responses
So just a quick summary:
I think I will go and learn how to use gnuplot (just to get familiar
with at least the basics).
I'll also go take a look at VTK and R and see how I like those.
SAGE and ROOT definitely sound interesting. I've registered for an
online Sage account, but I'd prefer to wait for an official Debian
package to make it into unstable before actually installing.
Thanks again for the help!
--
Jimmy Wu
Registered Linux User #454138
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