Re: which Linux distribution offers the best octave-support?

[Marcus Vinicius Eiffle Duarte]

Hi, Andreas!

Since a few months back, there is an Octave maintainer for Fedora. The
packages octave, octave-devel, octave-forge and all its dependencies
that are not part of the Core are in Extra repository, only a "yum
install octave octave-devel octave-forge" away. And the maintainer
(which name I cannot remember now, but is an active member of this
mailing list) is doing a great work in keeping packages updated and
fixing eventual bugs.

It is true that Fedora has few official packages for popular
math/scientific software - I can only think of Octave, R, GSL and
Maxima right now. However, it is overal a great distro IMHO. If you
are using your PC as a general purpose workstation, and not only to
number crunching and/or development, Fedora would be a good choice.
Besides, there are lots of "unofficial" packages for lots of software
(with a lack of scientific apps, I admit), and it is rather easy to
solve building problems under Fedora, as the user base is huge, and
you'll almost always find someone that has solved your problem(s)
before.

Marcus Vinicius



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