436. Miramath on debian

For no particular reason (well, because of this: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=104566) here's a very brief how-to to get miramath up and running. There may well be more packages required and which I had pre-installed. The pre-built miramath binaries don't work on debian jessie, but since this is python...well..Anyway:

First compile and install PyQwt-Polar. It takes quite a while. Note that there's a conflict between PyQwt-Polar and python-qwt5-qt4 which may potentially be serious. A side-effect of this is that you can't build a proper package, since dpkg would detect this conflict (hence the make install). What this means is that PyQwt-Polar will over-write files installed by the python-qwt5-qt4 files i.e. A potentially Bad Thing.  Consider setting it up in a chroot.

There's another reason why I wouldn't recommend miramath for serious work at the moment -- it is in pre-alpha and the degree to which is it maintained isn't entirely clear to me. For scientific work, use octave and maxima, which are well-maintained and have been around for ages.

The flip-side of this is obviously that there's no harm in checking out a new and interesting piece of software, and presumably no-one is preventing you from contributing. Anyway. The main reason for checking this out was the debian forum post referenced above.

I did this on Debian Jessie, but it should work on Wheezy as well.

sudo apt-get install python-sip-dev python-qt4-dev python-scipy python-qt4-gl python-sympy python-ply python-qwt5-qt4 python-qwt3d-qt4 python-guiqwt python-dev libqwt-dev libqwt5-qt4

mkdir ~/tmp/
cd ~/tmp
wget http://ufpr.dl.sourceforge.net/project/miramath/PyQwt-Polar/PyQwt-Polar-5.2.0.tar.bz2
tar xvf PyQwt-Polar-5.2.0.tar.bz2
cd PyQwt-Polar-5.2/
cd configure/
python configure.py -Q ../qwt-5.2
make
sudo make install

Then continue:

wget http://waix.dl.sourceforge.net/project/miramath/Release%20Tarballs/miramath0.020.tar.bz2
cd ~/miramath
sed -i 's/sympy.abs/sympy.Abs/g' symbolics_init.py
chmod +x main.py
./main.py