on Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 12:09:25AM +0000, Faheem Mitha ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Dear People, > > I was wondering whether how well (or at all) some commercial > scientific programs run on Debian, say Sarge. Specifically, I was > wondering about Gauss, Mathematica, Matlab, SAS, Splus.
All are supported. The main problem with such apps is pricing. SAS Inc., for example, charges server rates for its GNU/Linux product, effectively it's double the price of the NT workstation product. I've had extensive experience with SAS on a wide range of platforms (PC, Unix, VMS, MVS, Linux) over ten years. Googling "Scientific Applications for Linux" will bring you to the SAL website. You can find a large collection of free and proprietary apps there. I've long suspected that such pricing strategies are the result of strong-arming of companies by Microsoft for preferential access to MSFT information and/or other relationships. I've nothing to back this up other than there being no reasonable rationale to the pricing model, particularly as the Linux ports are in many cases simply rebuilds of existing Unix products. See the comments regarding porting Oracle to GNU/Linux, the operative phrase being "we just typed 'make'" -- the port required zero lines of code modification. My very strong recommendation is that you explore free alternatives to products which provide comperable functionality. SAS, for example, can be largely supplanted by a mix of Perl/Python, R, and/or gnuplot. R is itself a free version of S, from which Splus is derived. Some of the vendors you mention have been far more supportive of GNU/Linux for years, Mathematics and Matlab among them, and the free alternatives (octave) are still relatively feature-poor. The question is whether you value expediency or freedom. > I think that Mathematica runs ok, but I'm not sure about the others. I > suppose in most cases these programs are only available as binaries, > so there would have to be compatibility between these binaries and the > Debian shared libraries. Also, most of these commercial programs only > support the commercial Linux distributions like Redhat/SuSE. Largely, this means that if you want online tech support, they're going to want you to run RH/SuSE. In practice, _most_ proprietary software is relatively distro-agnostic. If that's not good enough for you, a chroot install of the distro in question may sneak you through a tech support call. > If anyone has specific information about these programs, please let me > know, and for simplicity let us assume that I am talking about the > most recent versions. Thanks. The vendor will be the definitive source on GNU/Linux support. Again, most software tends to run w/o issues on most distros. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? How to unwedge / disable your X display manager login: http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/xdm-disable.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
