On Sat, 2006-12-16 at 17:46 -0600, Bill Wood wrote:
> Hi, I'm considering switching Linux distributions to Debian or Ubuntu,
> and I wanted to know what the community experience was regarding using
> Maxima on either. In particular, are there any known functional or
> performance issues? Also, is there any difficulty staying current?
I use Debian which always seems to get the latest Maxima CVS in its
unstable branch within a day or two of release. Also, the Debian
package gets patched quickly (five patches as of now).
As for you, Mr Villate... I have a few words. ;-)
#include <debian-flame> //C++ non-standard headers
On 16/12/06, Jaime E. Villate <villate at fe.up.pt> wrote:
> I use Ubuntu in my MacBook and in my desktops, and Debian in my
> servers. In all of them Maxima works perfectly well. I do not install
> the official Debian packages, because they are usually too old.
jordi at Ophelia:~$ apt-cache policy maxima
maxima:
Installed: 5.10.0-6
Candidate: 5.10.0-6
5.10 with Debian patchlevel 6 too old for you? You'd rather have a
time machine in 5.11 in the future? Unless by "official" you mean the
stable distribution, which I have no idea what it's using... but if
all goes according to the Debian takeover plans, in a few more weeks
stable will have 5.10 too.
Maxima in Debian unstable and other packages are more up-to-date than
Ubuntu's Universe, since Ubuntu doesn't maintain the Universe snapshot
that Debian itself is maintaining. You'll have to wait 6 months in
Ubuntu to get the latest Maxima CVS, while kudos to
jordi at Ophelia:~$ apt-cache show maxima
[stuff]
Maintainer: Camm Maguire <camm at enhanced.com>
[morestuff]
Camm Maguire for the timely updates on the Debian Maxima packages.
> You can use alien to create deb packages from the Fedora rpm's in
> the homepage, and install with "dpkg -i package-name.deb".
Generally, recommending alien to a Debian newbie is a bad idea. My
personal recommendation for a newbie is to use a mixed
testing/unstable system with testing as preferred:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-apt-get.en.html#s-default-version
As a non-critical non-server distro, Debian testing serves well.
</flame>
HTH (really, I do),
- Jordi G. H.