I'd like to advertise that the open source math project, Sage, has Solaris binaries available:
http://sagemath.org/bin/solaris/ There are only two other platforms that have binaries available, which are Linux (and thus FreeBSD I suppose, via binary compatibility) and OS X. Windows support is done through prepackaged VM images. Also, there is a very nice web based ajax gui (Sage Notebook) that really is just begging to be run in a Solaris Zone on your system =). You can try it out at sagemath.org without installing any software, and even save your own work there. Why is Sage so amazing? First of all, it uses python as a language for doing math and science (way better than Matlab syntax, IMO), and it uses an interactive shell (IPython) that makes it very easy to discover the API as you go. Secondly, it integrates *hundreds* of the highest quality open source niche mathematical programs in to one unified program. Unfortunately it is a bit difficult to compile on Solaris (ok, that is an understatement) due to it using so many packages which have probably been used on Linux and OS X alone, up until now (even the OS X port took more effort than the initial linux build). I know some of the developers are interested in varying degrees to get it working more easily in Solaris, so I encourage anyone interested to head over to sagemath.org and check it out. It will also be nice to see a Sage build with dtrace support in python, which would be easy enough to do if you are clever enough to get it built in the first place since there are existing python dtrace diff files around ;-) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
