Symbolic computation on Fedora

[Michael Hannon]

Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> 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