Now here is a very sorry state of affairs. I was looking at C_ntua's comments in another thread, and sat down to do a little math to get a better understanding of it, and realized that "bc -l", the standard GNU CLI calculator, has an impoverished set of trig functions -- like, no tan(). It struck me that the only trigonometry I have done with the computer I've done in a C programming context, using the math library. But I don't need to write a program to check out a few values.
So I thought, big woop, probably there is a nice graphical scientific calculator packaged in my distro. At first, I thought I had made a spelling mistake:
[root~/perl] yum search trigonometry
Warning: No matches found for: trigonometry
No Matches found
Kind of strange. Then I remembered using xcalc in the past, which was part of a base X windows install and had trig functions. Not anymore -- xcalc is dead!
So I headed online. I found three candidates, they are all out of date, so neither the source nor a binary would do me any good:
xbc -- uses gtk 1 (current version is 2)
qmcalc -- uses Qt 3 (current version is 4)
Archimede
That last one is pretty interesting, take a look at this screen shot:
Archimede: calcolatrice RPN e algebrica
Okay, I thought, terrific, this almost looks like fun. The binary was compiled against an ancient version of X, unfortunately, but they had a sourceforge site. Guess what the losers who created and abandoned Archimede did? They created a "source package" (presumably so they could have a free Sourceforge page) and put the same unusable binary in it.
You know what this adds up to: there is no currently maintained GUI scientific calculator for the linux platform. Please please tell me I am wrong and point me to the download.
Maybe good news for someone tho. Here's a nice project that could easily be managed by one person, you just need to learn some gtk. And if you do a decent job, the some distro (or all of them) will probably pick it up.
In the meantime, I guess I'm using gcc
