Should I Get Sage? - Analysis, Integrals, ODE/PDE's

[fluidistic]

Hello,
I currently have Maxima and gnuplot installed and I planned to install R (for data analysis). However I've read about "Sage" software. It seems extremely powerful and seems to do almost anything possible one could dream of.
It consists of a programming language and apparently 89 softwares (see http://www.sagemath.org/links-components.html) including Maxima and R.
The download file is about 411 Mb and I only have around 6.5 Gb free in my hard disk. I wonder how much space Sage will occupy once I install it entirely. I did not find this information on their website.
In these 89 softwares, I am sure that I won't use many/most of them. And I don't think I can choose what to install and what not to. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, Sage contains "gcc", a compiler that I already have. So I wonder whether I should uninstall gcc and Maxima before installing Sage (I use linux, Ubuntu 12.04) if I were to install it.

I would like to use a very powerful software for data analysis, evaluating integrals, solving ODE/PDE's and why not to learn a bit of programming. Do you think that Sage a sage decision for me?

Thank you guys.

 

[jedishrfu]

The SAGE user guide for 6.1.1 says you need at least 2GB disk space for installation of the prebuilt libraries. (See page 11 or thereabouts)

CHAPTER THREE PRE-BUILT BINARY INSTALL

3.1 Linux and OS X

Installation from a pre-built binary tarball should in the long run be the easiest and fastest way to install Sage. This
is not necessarily the case right now. Note that Sage is itself a programming environment, so building it from source
guarantees you maximum flexibility in the long run. Nonetheless, we provide pre-built binaries.

Assumptions: You have a computer with at least 2 GB of free disk space and the operating system is Linux (32-bit or
64-bit) or OS X (10.4 or later).
Highly Recommended: It is highly recommended that you have LaTeX installed. If you want to view animations, you
should install either ImageMagick or ffmpeg. ImageMagick or dvipng is also used for displaying some LaTeX output
in the Sage notebook.

Download the latest binary tarball from
http://www.sagemath.org/download.html
. For example, it might be called
sage-x.y.z-x86_64-Linux.tgz
. Unpack it on your computer in a directory which you have permission to
read and write

 

[fluidistic]

The SAGE user guide for 6.1.1 says you need at least 2GB disk space for installation of the prebuilt libraries. (See page 11 or thereabouts)

Thank you very much. I think I am going for it.
I wonder however if I should uninstall Maxima and gcc or whether they will automatically be updated.
I mean I do not want to have 2 versions of gcc and Maxima installed at once.

 

[jedishrfu]

I would read the SAGE Install/User Guide for what they suggest:

http://www.sagemath.org/doc/installation/

 

[fluidistic]

I would read the SAGE Install/User Guide for what they suggest:

http://www.sagemath.org/doc/installation/

Thanks. I have started the download. The "downside" is that I need 5 Gb free in my hard disk.
I also found the information I was looking for:

SAGE_INSTALL_GCC - by default, Sage will automatically detect whether to install the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) package or not (depending on whether C, C++ and Fortran compilers are present and the versions of those compilers). Setting SAGE_INSTALL_GCC=yes will force Sage to install GCC. Setting SAGE_INSTALL_GCC=no will prevent Sage from installing GCC.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Unless this is a dirt-cheap notebook, saying you have ~5GB free raises red flags.

A lot of software depends on free disk space to function correctly - the use of temporary files, sorting is a classic example. If the amount free on you box is less than about 10% of total space on the disk. Seriously, you need to consider actions like: start off-loading junk files to USB sticks, removing all those tunes you never listen to.

Your box could suddenly go into 'molasses-mode' computing. Or freeze completely if you fill the disk.

Optimally you should have more than 10% free, hard disks experience performance degradation below 15% free. Especially during large file manipulation.

 

[AlephZero]

Unless you have a really small capacity disk, most likely it is full of "junk" that you don't want any more. If you don't know about the Linux du (disk usage) command, this would be a good time to learn.

If you have some big files that you want to keep, big capacity external or internal drives are cheap these days - a 2TB drive doesn't cost much more than 1TB.

 

[fluidistic]

I see guys.
Basically I have a Ubuntu partition of about 25 Gb (this is where I have ~5 Gb free) and another one, much newer, of Lubuntu (I have around 18 Gb free out of 30 but I'm installing Sage here after all). The rest of my hard disk are 2 Windows XP that I very rarely use, mostly exclusively to format usb sticks because gparted doesn't do it well in a way that Windows can even recognize, that is, when I put some "live CD" version of linux on the usb stick.
About external HD, I think it may be a good idea but where I live they are very expensive (probably the most expensive on Earth although maybe Venezuela may beat "us". For example there http://www.fravega.com/disco-externo-sony-hd-e1-de-1tb.html, a 1 TB external hard disk costs about 358.4 US dollars. I think in the USA that's roughly the price of a core i7 processor... this is madness!) like any other piece of hardware. But I have long thought of buying one, until recently I heard about SSD and that they are used as hard disk in new computers. I thought about buying a SSD and connect it via usb. The problem is my computer has usb 2.0 and not the 3.0 so I'm not sure this would be a good thing to say install linux on the SSD and use it instead of my current computer's hard disk.

 

[fluidistic]

The installation just finished, it took 3 hours to complete. I still have latex to install.
P.S.:I used 2 cores to compile and install.

 

[AlephZero]

For example there http://www.fravega.com/disco-externo-sony-hd-e1-de-1tb.html, a 1 TB external hard disk costs about 358.4 US dollars.

Ouch. The cheapest one on Amazon UK right now is £40 (about $65 US dollars).

And UK computer prices are usually higher than US prices.