Running Matlab and (possibly) Mathematica - possible?

Hi,

I am an undergraduate physics student, and I frequently use Matlab and Mathematica. I also require OpenOffice, as well as a little bit of GIMP and Inkscape. I found Acer Aspire One notebooks interesting as they are very convenient and as light-weight as a book. As I prefer Linux, the A150L with its large 120GB HD appealed to me. I wonder whether someone has tried to run Matlab (r2007a, or similar) or Mathematica 6 one any Acer Aspire One notebook? I use Linux-Versions of these programs. I would be very grateful for any information on how good these tools run on Acer Aspire One notebooks.

Regards,

kP

 

OpenOffice 2.3.0 is mostly pre-installed (Writer, Impress & Calc) and you can easily add the Draw, Math & Base components from the repositories. Similarly with Gimp 2.4.6. This is usually quite easy EG:

In a terminal as root:
$ yum install gimp

Inkscape also appears to be in the repository but I haven't tried to install it.

Neither Matlab nor Mathematica show up in the repository so you would be doing a bit of trailblazing by downloading it from their respective sites.

This OS is Linpus lite based on Fedora 8 which has been modified for a smaller footprint (etc etc) SO beware of incompatibilities with installed libraries.

This is a nice little machine but I wonder if it mightn't be pushing it a bit far to expect it to run those applications.
Best of luck though.

 

I think with matlab or mathematica it really would depend on how complicated your code is. If your doing fairly simple things I can't see why the aspire one would have problems with it, but once you get it more complicated things could take awhile to run.

 

Mathematica 6 runs ok in Linpus Linux on the Aspire One. The builtin benchmark runs in 232.365 secs with 1gb ram, which is not great but the software is perfectly useable, even with 3d graphics, press F12 to make windows fullscreen. (The Asus eeepc 701 4gb with a celeron@900mhz runs the benchmark in 205 secs, over 10% faster)

 

Hi,

I am currently running Mathlab R2008a on the AOA150 (updated to 1.5Gb of RAM, 120GB HD) under Vista Business and while it is not a speed demon, the software is surprisingly usable. Screen estate is a bigger issue for me so when I use Mathlab, I use an external monitor.


Regards.

 

Just ran bench(1) in Mathlab R2008a and my machine's relative speed score is 10. A dual Xeon running at 2.66 GHz is at 36, a 2.4 GHz Quad core Q6600 scores 84. I guess, given the price of the AA1, that a score of 10 is not so bad

 

Hi,

thank you for your replies, they're very helpful! Honestly, I wouldn't have expected that the AA1 is as useful as you said when it comes to Matlab/Mathematica.
I had completely forgotten that there is no DVD drive in the AA1 - how did you install the two tools? As I possess the DVDs of M and M, will it work well with copying their contents on an external HD and then plugging it into the AA1 via USB and then installing? Did someone chose this way to install one of the tools?

kP

 

I have just installed Mathematica 5.0 using an usb stick. The installation itself went fine, but due to some changes in the Xwindows system in the past few years some tweaking was needed.

Unfortunately I currently still have a font issue: the text of all the menuoptions appear as [][][][]. Let us see if it can be remedied... Probably those problems will not exist in a more up to date version.

Or I could take a look at the free (wx)maxima...

 

Hi

I installed mathcad and mathematica by copying .iso images to a usb key. I installed deamon tools on the AA1 so I could mount the iso images on a virtual dvd drive. Installed from the virt dvd drive after. However, the way you are thinking of doing it is probably ok too.


Regards