[geeks] Desktops

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 08:00:00PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> I'd like to use OpenOffice, but it flat doesn't work on IRIX.  They're
> planning to get it there someday, though.  I used StarOffice on Solaris
> back when a SPARCplug was my primary workstation.  It was slow as hell,
> but they've supposedly fixed that in OpenOffice.

Sparc plug as workstation?  How did you give it a head?  I suppose one
could use it with an X-Term and still call it a workstation.
 
> spreadsheet[1].  For a database program, I've got PostgreSQL, which beats
> Access to crumbs--if you happen to know SQL.  For presentation graphics, I
> use xfig.  For raster graphics, I use GIMP. 

I use dia for diagramming things.  It works well on linux, probably OK on
Solaris, and probably pretty badly on irix though.

If I needed to actually put together a presentation, I'd probably either
go to the Mac or use the GIMP.  But, as far as I know, nobody has made
a decent program for controlling slide style presentations.  Preferably
with multi head support (ideally slides would be operated by a second
person, so he needs a head, and the project is a head, and the speaker
has two preview screens, the current slide, and the next one).  A simple
Onyx, Crimson, or quad headed G200 should do the job nicely.
 
> As it is, I'm pretty happy.  The only holes in my toolset are a -real-
> full-featured spreadsheet and a symbolic/numerical computation environment
> that isn't as much "fun" to work with as DrScheme[2].  Excel and
> Mathematica are the only "work" applications that I still use Windows for.  
> OpenOffice would/will replace the need for Excel.  I keep hearing good
> things about Maxima as a replacement for Mathematica, but I haven't gotten
> it up-and-running as most of the LISP dependencies expect IRIX 5.x instead
> of 6.x, and, sadly, a lot has changed between the two.

Mathematica is available for linux, solaris, and irix.  

Maxima should just work if you have either CMUCL or GCL, and GCL should just 
work on Irix, but I can't test that as I no longer have Irix access.  It
never worked very smoothly for me, and I can't ever seem to remeber to use
it if I go two weeks without touching it, where as Mathematica sticks with
me even between months of disuse.  Symmax (flow/tree graph based Maxima 
frontend) seems very cool, but again, I can't remeber how to use it between 
periods of not using it.

Gnumeric used to be a program that would "JustWork" on Irix, but now it 
requires full GNOME rather than just GTK.  I used to use Gnumeric regularly.

I didn't know that DrScheme ran on Irix.

As to doing calc by hand, surely you must have read SICP by now!  In one
of the later chapters, it teaches you to write your own deriver.  It 
doesn't talk about integration, but numeric integration is easy, and 
symbolic is done unbelievably badly by both Mathematica and Maxima, so
why bother?

> --Jonathan
> [1] I guess I could use straight LaTeX and even have cell-references, so
>     long as there were no forward-reference, but I'm not quite -that-
>     sick.


-- 
Joshua D. Boyd

Social Security - I have greater faith that Elvis is alive
and programming VAX assembler than that I will ever receive
a dime from it.  --  Patrick Giagnocavo