Looking for Derive workalikes

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

Well, as I said earlier I'm probably not the one to be doing this
search.  Anyway, I tried to find out what Derive does by going to the
home site for it.  There didn't seem to be much there, so I went to
other sites where Derive is mentioned along with other packages. 
Packages that tended to be mentioned along with Derive were Mathematica,
MacSyma, Maple, and MATLAB.  All four of those are available for Linux.

I then went to the Scientific Applications for Linux site
<http://sal.kachinatech.com> to check on what mathematics programs were
available.  There are quite a few, and I'm not competent to evaluate
them.  Bill, could you take a look there, or perhaps ask someone on your
faculty who might be receptive to do so?

The impression I got from this search is that there is a good deal of
exercises and lesson sets written to use Derive and that that enhances
its desireability among educators.  Is that a fair characterization?  If
it is, our best bet for finding a Linux equivalent is to find a package
that covers similar ground and then to start developing exercises and
lesson sets for it.

Odile, could you take a look at the SAL site I mentioned above and see
if anything looks like a good possibility?  Thanks, everyone.

-- 
Doug Loss                 A life spent making mistakes is not only
Data Network Coordinator  more honorable, but more useful than a
Bloomsburg University     life spent doing nothing.
dloss@bloomu.edu                G. B. Shaw