Been a fan of UNIX/Linux for years since graduate school. My first encounter of Linux was the cluster that Bin and I built back in 2004-5 for numerical analysis and electron microscopy simulation. Later I awarded myself an Apple Powerbook that runs on MacOS X, which is also a flavour of UNIX. However, my UNIX/Linux journey came to a halt since late 2007, when I started working for first job, which did not require much programming skills. It only starts to come back recently as my current job involves some finite element method simulation of electro-optical systems.
A lucky coincidence is that, my wife's company gave her a new PC for her job, thus retiring her old Sony VAIO laptop. The VAIO has been gathering dust for months, and with a clunky 5-year-old Windows Vista running painstakingly slow. A random point in last couple evenings, I saw the word Ubuntu flying by. Immediately, I made the decision of turning my wife's retired VAIO, into a Linux machine, purely for relearning Linux, programming and numerical analysis.
After about half an hour of installation, the VAIO laptop now boots with Ubuntu 12.10. A clean and stable system, and I don't have to worry about installing anti-virus software.
The first few packages that I installed following the OS are:
-Vim, my favorite text editor
-Python, a great high-level scripting language that I recently started learning
-Numpy, a numerical analysis module for Python
-Scipy, a scientific analysis module for Python
-Matplotlib, a scientific plotting module for Python
I expect to use Python-Numpy-Scipy-Matplotlib to do a lot of things that other people do with Matlab on Windows PC.
I am also glad to find that one can also install Microchip's MPLAB IDE and XC18 compilers on Linux (for PIC micro-controller programming). I will wait a little bit, but probably won't be long.
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