2. Introduction
GNU/Linux is probably the platform of choice for scientific
computing. There exists a wide variety of high level languages,
debugging tools and other code development tools for
programming, numerical subroutines for solving various types of
equations, plotting and visualization packages, word processing
software which can display equations and figures and in fact parallel
programming software to construct a supercomputer with off the shelf
PC parts and some hardware. This document aims to provide a list
of free software for carrying out the above
tasks and links to tutorials and other documents on how to setup and
use these software applications.
This document does not aim to provide links to subject specific free
software available for GNU/Linux systems. It aims to show how
GNU/Linux can be used best to handle scientific computing tasks.
It is hoped that people or institutions with interest in a
specific subject list, compile a list of the free software available
for that subject ... for example see Linux for Astronomy,
Linux for Biotechnology and Linux for
Chemistry at
The Random Factory
. Another site with a lot of links (to commercial and
free) scientific software is
Scientific Applications
on Linux. The
GNU Software Directory also has links to many of the links
provided in this howto plus many more topic specific software.
You may also want to check out
The Science and Engineering section at Freshmeat.net.
The software links provided are classified into
Just installing GNU/Linux on your PC makes it a powerful workstation.
The various popular distributions however do not have all the tools
needed to make it the ideal scientific computing machine. This HOWTO
aims to fill in this gap by creating a list of free software useful
for scientific computing. It is assumed that people reading this
document already have a PC with Linux and the GNU utilities installed.
For those who do not have such a setup and want to install GNU-Linux
can check out GNU/Linux Systems
for links to documents on installing GNU/Linux, and also on how to get
started using GNU/Linux. Recently there has been an effort by Dirk
Eddelbuettel to create a scientific computing environment
Quantian
which probably is the first GNU-Linux distribution tailored for
Scientists. I checked out the latest release and it has almost
all the packages mentioned in this document and many packages
not mentioned. It is fair to say that if you have any linux distribution
in which the packages are managed by rpms or any debian based system,
you will find pre-compiled binaries of these packages and will not
have to waste much time installing them.
Free eBook: 
