No Email, some other suggestions [LWN.net]

No Email, some other suggestions

Posted Oct 2, 2002 17:48 UTC (Wed) by torsten (guest, #4137)
Parent article: The Case for Linux in Universities

I grepped the source of the main page, http://www.kegel.com and there is no mailto: defined. I clicked over to his Caltech alumnus linked University page,
http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~dank/ and there is similarly no email address.

I get the feeling he definitely doesn't want to be bothered.

I found his paper lacking in some necessary substance. I study in the Electrical (ECE) department, focusing on digital design. Our professors are of a practical nature. They've done the time to develop curiculae revolving around certain software, and that software must always be available.

It is unreasonable to request they change from something they know, and more importantly, that they can practically accomplish work with. Work is more important than philosophy, to engineers.

So, I would recommend adding a comparative analysis of university level applications. Some good pairs:

MS Word <-> OpenOffice
Matlab <-> octave + gnuplot
IE <-> Mozilla
etc....

Some other applications which I use, and I believe they prevent the adoption of Linux because they are only available in Windows versions:
AutoCAD (Mechanical Design)
MaxPlus (digital design)
PSpice (Analog Design)

MaxPlus is made by Altera, for use with their Alter FPGA's. They do not offer their UNIX version to students, and there is no equivalent hardware+software pair.

I've used gEDA, but it doesn't cut it for many needs, still too immature (maybe it has been improved since I last used it).

I've downloaded a couple of PSPice packages here and there, but none of them were up to par, or gave similar results to the DesignLab PSPice software.

At the moment, I am very dependent on VMware to run these things, and I would not expect a University to pay $100/seat (or some negotiated academic price) plus a full copy of the Windows license. Also, my university has a site license - all students can download many MS products, price distributed over per-semester academic fees (some call this free). AutoCAD still costs a lot.

Some days I feel like a Linux project waiting to happen, since I know hardware and C.
Torsten

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No Email, some other suggestions

Posted Oct 2, 2002 18:57 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

For electronic CAD, all the leading EDA firms provide almost all their tools for Linux. For ASIC design, in fact, many tools are available only for Unix and Linux, and not for any Windows operating system. Do you think that nVidia and their like design their chips on Windows? Nope. They use Solaris or Linux, and increasingly the latter.

No Email, some other suggestions

Posted Oct 2, 2002 23:55 UTC (Wed) by torsten (guest, #4137) [Link]

This is great news. Hopefully, when I enter the commercial world, I won't be bound to Windows. As for the electonic CAD stuff, I would be interested in some suggestions, specifically to the need:

VHDL entry
schematic entry
quick programming to FPGA board
big student discounts on the FPGA board

Currently, this is what Altera Corporation offers to many professors. The Alter in-house developed MaxPLUS program is very simple to use for students entering their first significant digital design class. The UPX student board has a large CPLD and 70k gate FPGA, plus JTAG input for a nice $150 US.

Torsten

Another software package available under linux...

Posted Oct 2, 2002 20:41 UTC (Wed) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link]

Someone else already responded about some of the software you mentioned being available for linux. I didn't know about that, but I do know about another package you mentioned. You seemed to imply (I could be wrong, but that's how it came across to me) that a transfer from Windows to Linux would require a transfer from matlab to octave and gnuplot. However, if you have matlab for windows then there should be no problem in getting matlab for unix or linux. In fact, I've hardly used matlab under Windows but have used it a great deal under *nix. In fact, it was quite a while after I started using matlab before I knew it was available for windows (and maybe I didn't know about it because it really wasn't available--I don't know).

Of course, it is good to point out octave + gnuplot, as the Mathworks (creators of matlab) have developed a monopoly and are becoming highly Microsoft-ish.