I decided to download and install Mathematica 6.0 for Linux- our school has a license agreement with Wolfram so we can use Mathematica for free. Ubuntu 7.04 however doesn’t seem to want to play nicely with Mathematica. Even after using a couple of tricks to get it to install and to display output properly, Mathematica is still seg-faulting anytime I try to evaluate anything more complicated than simple arithmetic.
It works fine however on Fedora 8.
I haven’t spent very much time troubleshooting the problem yet, and I would imagine the problem could be fixed without too much work, but right now I just don’t have the time. I haven’t had the need to use Mathematica before, but so far I’m pretty impressed. The Mathematica Demonstrations Project has a bunch of cool visualization demos, and you can even attend free online seminars to learn how to use some of the features of Mathematica.
There are some open-source alternatives to Mathematica (e.g. Gnu Octave and R)
) that I would like to learn eventually, but for now I think I’ll stick to Mathematica since there is already a wealth of documentation for it online.
Try to use WxMaxima as an replacement for Mathematica instead of R or Octave as you wrote before, the philosophy of the program is much closer to Mathematica. It is in the repositories, at least under Kubuntu (7.04 and 7.10 as well).
Greetings, mir@
Hi mir@, thanks for the suggestion. I’ve heard of WxMaxima, but have never bothered
to take a look. I will definitely check it out now though.
Try moving the file libPHANToMIO.so.4 which should be in your SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux directory out of the way so that Mathematica doesn’t load it. It just seems to be a driver for a particular 3D mouse, so unless you have one of those, you won’t miss much. I had similar segfaults whenever UI controls were part of the output of some evaluation and that fixed it for me. Took a bit of strace-ing to figure that out.