Good, free CAS for UNIX?

[HP67]

Does anybody know of a good, free (as in no cost) CAS for UNIX?

I have mostly non-Intel boxes and would be interested in finding a CAS to run on one or more of them for occasional use. The latest incarnation of Macsyma looks like it might be a good candidate. Any other ideas?

Xcas would probably be very good since it comes from a trustworthy source but I don't see my platforms listed and I don't see how to get the source code.

Thank you.

[Thomas Klemm]

[OT] Mathematica free for Raspberry PI
It's a little slow though.

Cheers
Thomas

[kusmi]

I was once using Maxima http://maxima.sourceforge.net

Not sure how it compares to others. For my use cases (symbolic matrix calculations) it was good enough ;-)

[spinkham]

If you're not running anything too heavy, sage math cloud or Wolfram Alpha are zero install..

https://cloud.sagemath.com/

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Sage has sympy and maxima available.

[bhtooefr]

I believe this is the page you're looking for, Giac being the engine underlying Xcas (and it appears that Xcas is included in that source bundle): http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~pari...tml#source

[Manolo Sobrino]

Reduce is extremely good and extremely powerful. As it has no bells nor whistles it doesn't get the appreciation it deserves. It's a 45 year old CAS focused on A, so no graphing, there's gnuplot for that.

[HP67]

(05-20-2014 06:39 PM)Thomas Klemm Wrote:  [OT] Mathematica free for Raspberry PI

I read about that briefly earlier. Very nice that they give a free license. But probably not very useful.

(05-20-2014 07:57 PM)kusmi Wrote:  I was once using Maxima http://maxima.sourceforge.net

This is the one that I noted above that looks most promising on non-Intel.

(05-20-2014 08:40 PM)spinkham Wrote:  If you're not running anything too heavy, sage math cloud or Wolfram Alpha are zero install..

Absolutely NO CLOUD AND NO GOOGLE HERE!. But for occasional light use the Wolfram site is really cool.

(05-20-2014 09:40 PM)bhtooefr Wrote:  I believe this is the page you're looking for, Giac being the engine underlying Xcas (and it appears that Xcas is included in that source bundle)

It is not clear to me whether Giac has any front end (I think that's what Xcas is). At this point I don't think Giac is going to be useful alone. And unfortunately there are some nasty GPL pieces that are painful to build anywhere but Linux because of non-portable development practices gcc-isms and other GNU-dependencies. I generally keep my systems as GNU and GPL free as possible, so this is probably not going to be a good choice for me.

(05-20-2014 10:35 PM)Manolo Sobrino Wrote:  Reduce is extremely good and extremely powerful. As it has no bells nor whistles it doesn't get the appreciation it deserves. It's a 45 year old CAS focused on A, so no graphing, there's gnuplot for that.

This might be good if the platform I want to run it on is supported. It says it is based on two variants of LISP (both of which are obsolete since about 1989/1990 when Common Lisp won) but they are included in the source distro. If I can't get Macsyma to work then I'll look into this.

Thanks guys for all the suggestions.

[cutterjohn]

(05-20-2014 07:57 PM)kusmi Wrote:  I was once using Maxima http://maxima.sourceforge.net

Not sure how it compares to others. For my use cases (symbolic matrix calculations) it was good enough ;-)

maxima is good as a cas but I would hesitate to use it primarily for matrix operations. Octave is FAR better for that.

http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

[Bunuel66]

As an alternative, Geogebra is a nice package including a CAS. Maybe not the most powefull CAS on earth but well integrated within this software. Can run on any machine supporting Java.
Geogebra

[HP67]

Thank you. I usually avoid Java like the plague but in this case the box I want to run a CAS on is actually a good Java platform. I will take a serious look at this.

[Tim Wessman]

It is actually giac in the background... (the cas part)

[HP67]

Non-sequitur alert! What is giac in the background?

[Simone Cerica]

FriCAS
http://fricas.sourceforge.net/
http://axiom-wiki.newsynthesis.org/FrontPage

[HP67]

Thank you. I like IBM stuff. Will look into this!

[Tim Wessman]

(05-22-2014 04:44 AM)HP67 Wrote:  Non-sequitur alert! What is giac in the background?

Geogebra's CAS stuff. All driven by giac.

[Anderson Costa]

Is the Geogebra's CAS poor compared to Maxima or Octave??? I used it often for Geometry and I don't see a great CAS...

[HP67]

(05-22-2014 03:06 PM)Tim Wessman Wrote:  

(05-22-2014 04:44 AM)HP67 Wrote:  Non-sequitur alert! What is giac in the background?

Geogebra's CAS stuff. All driven by giac.

Thank you! The general reply button strikes again