• From: Berkeley, CA USA
  • Registered: 2010-04-05
  • Posts: 44

Topic: crunchbang for mathematica?

Hi all,

I just discovered crunchbang and I'm pretty excited. I run a dell mini 9 netbook and my main operating system is now #! 9.04.01 on a 16gb usb memory stick that I can use on whichever desktop happens to be in front of me! I like it.

What I want to do now is a little ridiculous and I'm not sure if this is the place to post it but here goes.

I'm a physics student and I use mathematica  (http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html) on a regular basis. Mathematica is essentially a programming environment for theoretical mathematics which can run computations and visualize data. This is pretty much the definition of software that one shouldn't use on a netbook but I can't really afford another computer. Also, it's kind of awesome to whip out a tiny, tiny laptop and run a path integral that you and the rest of your study group have no idea how to solve.

What I'd like to do is strip this netbook down to the absolute minimum operating system required to run mathematica and then optimize the system for that application (to the extent possible). #! looks like the kind of thing I might be able to use as a starting point and after lurking around the forums for a while I thought people here might be interested in helping me out. I'm not a linux expert (at all) but I think I'd be capable of setting up my own distribution for this if I had a little guidance. Is anyone interested in giving me some input?

Thanks!
Devin

  • andi
  • Member
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  • From: Moenchengladbach, Germany
  • Registered: 2009-08-29
  • Posts: 26

Re: crunchbang for mathematica?

Hi das88!

Have you tried to install Mathematica on the #!-netbook? I don't see why this should be a problem. Even a netbook has a processor and can make calculations. It just might be a bit slower for intens numerical calculations (what is btw. very practical math as well as solving a path integral smile.
I could not find any system requirements on the homepage you pointed to. But again i don't think a netbook is a problem in general. Maybe for some animated 3D graphic functions the netbook might be to slow, but for finding a antiderivative from a database it might be even to fast smile
So my advice would be find out what the system requirements are. And when you own the program already or if you can borrow the linux version from a friend give it a try.

  • From: Berkeley, CA USA
  • Registered: 2010-04-05
  • Posts: 44

Re: crunchbang for mathematica?

Thanks for checking in andi!

I've actually had it installed on this system before running ubuntu 9.10. It worked for almost everything I needed it to and I'm anticipating that it will run even better on #!. I'm mostly interested in finding out if there's a way for me to make the system feed mathematica even more resources than it consumes on its own, although the more I think about it the more I feel like #! is already designed with that in mind.

  • andi
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  • From: Moenchengladbach, Germany
  • Registered: 2009-08-29
  • Posts: 26

Re: crunchbang for mathematica?

I would guess the biggest advantage you get from running #! is that it consumes less ram then the default Ubuntu gnome desktop. So for ram intensive calculations it might be much faster, but i guess in most cases you won't notice a big speed difference compared to ubuntu. Maybe some graphical output will be reasonable faster as well.
In general i would say #! is designed to run applications. The system requires very few system resources so more resources are there for the application. And it might be that the newest Mathematica fills up some ram and in that case you might have a big advantage of using it. And in general i would say it's a very good idea to run #! on a system with limited resources like a netbook.

sorry for so much guessing smile

andi

  • From: Berkeley, CA USA
  • Registered: 2010-04-05
  • Posts: 44

Re: crunchbang for mathematica?

no worries!

that's pretty much the conclusion I've come to as well.... I'll just have to get the thing running and see how it goes.