Chris Hillman writes:

As it happens, I have recently been thinking about what math software I have found most useful over the past year, so I guess I am well placed to provide a lengthy answer to this query.

Great!

In my response, I will assume little prior knowledge or experience with (in particular) installing open source software

I appreciate this assumption (or lack of assumption), since this very issue has often been a bottleneck for me. ("Well, first install Xtools on your laptop, and then...")

It is true that there is a widely available and easily installed open source engine, Maxima, which is comparable to Macsyma, the system upon which Maple is based. For this reason, Maxima syntax is very similar to that of Maple, which is mostly helpful, although there are some annoying differences (like subts instead of subs).

Is there a simple way to install Maxima on a Mac running OS X?

Unfortunately, in my experience, the things which make Maple so useful include Groebner basis, differential algebra, and graphics packages, plus powerful commands like "casesplit" and "rifsimp", which at present have no equivalent in Maxima. This is very unfortunate! Indeed, strictly speaking "bare-bones" Maxima more closely resembles "text-based" Maple (e.g. called with maple rather than xmaple on a linux system), although there are open source graphical "front ends" which aim to allow users to interact with Maxima in much the same way that they may be accustomed to interacting with Maple.

I don't use any of the Maple commands that you say "make Maple so useful", and I use it exclusively in text-based mode. So if Maxima is stable and well-documented, that might be a good choice for me. (One thing I'd like is a simple way to create an m-by-n array of small cells with specified colors. What's the right tool for that job?)

Even so, spending a few thousand on the latest version of Maple will take you much further if you spend almost nothing on obtaining other mathematical software (and your OS plus useful general applications like browsers, postscript viewers, and so on, all of which are provided by any Linux distro). I also suggest below some other "moderately big ticket" projects you might want to consider, while you decide what to do with your funding, such as setting up a cluster.

One issue I'm facing is that Maple is not supported at Lowell. So if I have trouble installing it, and the license I get doesn't come with installation support, I'm out of luck.

2. Someone mentioned Debian as a good choice for your primary operating system, and I'll second that (with a caveat mentioned below).

I've been quite happy with my Mac OS X running shell-script windows that look like any old UNIX system. (I can think of one exception to the previous statement: I was pretty annoyed when I found out that OS X puts all the files and directories in one's Desktop into RAM at startup. Aside from the fact that it's undocumented, it's just not the sort of thing a UNIX system would do.)

And I should stress that a distro like Mepis is specifically designed to be very easily installed along with Windows in a "dual-boot" configuration, and in my experience installs without fuss with one click on the icon of the installation script when you boot off the live CD, which for Mepis and some other distros serves the double purpose of a demo/installation disk.

What's a "distro"? (Is it short for "distribution"?)

Setting up a dual-boot system requires using a disk partioning utility and configuring a boot loader, so this takes a bit more effort, but IIRC the Mepis instructions are very clear and I hear good things from people who have tried this.

I once had a dual-booting laptop (Debian and Windows), and I didn't like it. I think I'll use a Mac running a Mac OS that sits on top of a UNIX OS, running Parallels so that I can run Windows software.

Well, if you don't know about "live CDs" (actually, I guess you do know!) that would probably be my first answer to the query: what else is neat besides memory sticks?

Actually, I didn't know about live CDs by that name, but I have been given a few by various people (sometimes with bootleg software).

(Some live CDs automatically mount the disk R/W, which isn't always a good idea. "Mounting" is how Linux makes a "file system"--- a directory tree associated with a memory device such as a hard drive--- available to the user; this may work a bit differently for "removable media" like pendrives and floppies under some varieties of Linux.)

One way in which a flashdrive has recently been a big help is that I've been able to mount a flashdrive with a UNIX file system on my Mac, so that it can handle directories in which two or more files or subdirectories have the same name when file/directory names are interpreted in a case insensitive way. (This matters because when I was at the University of Wisconsin and using the math department's UNIX file system, I often created directories with several files whose names differed only in that one was capitalized and one was not. When I left my job there and took all my files on a CD, I was dismayed to discover that I couldn't put them on my Mac without losing some of them! So the flashdrive is great because not only is it more compact than a CD, but it can be formatted to house a UNIX file system.)

You can also use utilities like rsynch to keep your memory stick synchronized with the hard drive on your primary machine.

Sounds like rsynch (or is it rsync?) is also something I would find useful. How do I get it?

The Linux stand-in for Microsoft Office (spreadsheet, humdrum word processor, etc) is Open Office, which should be bundled with any major Linux distro (along with documentation).

My Mac came with Word:mac, which unfortunately doesn't have Equation Editor. Does Open Office? I should also say that the PDF viewer that came with my Mac is not in all respects perfect. I'll probably want to spring for something better.

SciLab (open source stand-in for MatLab)

That sounds like it'd be handy too. Thanks!

Of course, Mac OS has suffered some equally serious security problems in recent years, and I need hardly mention criticism of Windows and Vista.

Would the Mac OS security issue affect a user like me, who has a laptop with no fixed IP address?

If you are using Linux on laptops, probably the two most important things you can do are to learn about wireless security issues ("factory defaults" are likely to leave you highly vulnerable) and about encrypting your hard drive.

What about OS X on laptops? I guess I also want some sort of virus/spyware protection on my PC; any suggestions?

Hope some of this proves useful.

Indeed it has been! Jim