[luau] Mandrake rules again

Eric Hattemer hattenator at imapmail.org
Wed Oct 16 20:09:00 PDT 2002


So I'm sitting here doing math homework and I want to make sure that
integral(cos(nx)) is equal to sin(nx)/n, as I believe it to be.  Now I
could use my incredibly expensive calculator (and probably should), but
I'm sitting in front of a computer, so I decide to look for a program
like matlab that'd do the job.  So I run a search and run into some
university page that says what they have installed on their unix
system.  Matlab, Mathematica, and Scilab, which it lists as open
source.  I figured it might be something that I'd have to find,
download, compile, find I have missing packages, mess around for a few
hours, then give up.  But just in case, I go to my terminal and type
"urpmi scilab<tab>" and sure enough, it gives me the choice to download
scilab-2.6xx.  I was really amazed at how easy that was.  Seriously, if
all you've ever used is redhat, give mandrake a try.  Its really neat. 
Its contrib sources make it really easy to get unsupported 3rd party
programs, and they encourage people to compile their favorite packages
and put them in there.  Redhat doesn't usually do anything like that. 
Then if you want, you can check out plf.zarb.org, which has all the
latest in not quite legal linux programs available for mandrake too. 
Its not all subversive evil stuff.  There's things like dvd players, mp3
encoders, etc. in there.  Try the German mirror.  Its really fast for me
(100KByte/s) here in LA.  

-Eric Hattemer 





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