Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I need to do symbolic computation from time to time on my Fedora machine. > So far I have tried maxima, which seems quite good for simple things but > often fails to give me any usable results for more complicated cases. > Acquiring Mathematica licenses is not feasible at the moment; so my question > is what other alternatives have people used and liked? > So far I have come across these: > 1. SymPy - this seems a bit lacking in features (what I could gather > from the Wikipedia page as the project page is rather sparse). > 2. Sage - this seems to be quite well mature but non-trivial to maintain > an installation. > Anyone has any opinions? Hi, Suvayu. My first inclination was to recommend sage, until I saw your assessment of it. I tried it some time ago, mostly out of curiosity, as it seemed like a REALLY nice idea (and at the time I was doing a fair amount of Python). I recall that there was some version of Fedora on which I just couldn't get sage to work at all, although I've forgotten the details. At that point, I lost interest in it. But prompted by your note, I downloaded the sage source (didn't see a binary built for Fedora 17). It took a good long while to download, and it took a much longer time to build (via a simple "make" command), but it seems to have built successfully on my system (Fedora 17, x86_64). I ran a few of the examples in the sage tutorial, including some with the notebook interface, and everything worked as advertised. I realize that it's dangerous to draw conclusions from a single data point, but maybe the sage developers have solved the maintenance issues. I'd be interested to know what you finally decide to do. -- Mike -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
