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Looking for a great Christmas present? Look no more. New Scilab is out.
Download it, free, and pass it on to all your friends.
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Scilab Group proudly announces the release of Scilab-2.4.1
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What is Scilab?
- ---------------
Scilab is a scientific software environment for numerical
computations. It resembles Matlab/Simulink and MatrixX/SystemBuild family
of products. Scilab is developed at INRIA and is available via anonymous
ftp in source and binary formats:
ftp.inria.fr in directory INRIA/Scilab
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab
What is new?- ------------
This is essentially a bug fixing release but there are some new features.
Important improvements are in:
Matlab->Scilab translator
Hypermatrices
Scicos
Incremental link
On-line Help (on Windows)
Import/export of Matlab and Excel files
Scilab should compile on two new platforms:
Alpha Linux
Linux PPC (Mac)
A binary version is available for Linux PPC. Binaries for other platforms
(PC Linux, Windows 95/98/NT, and most Unix-X workstations) are available
as usual. The source version is also available in *.zip format (in addition
to *.tar.gz).
Following numerous requests, all the documentations are now available in
PDF and HTML formats (in addition to Postscript and Latex source included
in the source package).
An "incoming" directory has been placed in the main Scilab directory:
INRIA/Scilab (on ftp.inria.fr)
Contributions can be uploaded to this directory. Please send an email
to scilab@inria.fr every time you upload a file giving a short description
of your contribution (which can be a single file or a complete toolbox).
As usual, bug reports, suggestions, and any other Scilab related matters
can be sent to scilab@inria.fr. But please don't forget the newsgroup
comp.soft-sys.math.scilab
We are getting more and more emails at scilab@inria.fr, to a point that
we cannot respond to all of them. Many of these questions can be posted
to the newsgroup, which is currently underutilized. Please use it!
The development of Scilab continues
-----------------------------------
In a near future, as an add on toolbox (and later as a built-in feature),
there will be different integer data types (8/16 bit signed and unsigned)
in Scilab, with all the associated algebraic operations.
Work is under way to improve the graphics (scroll-bars on graphic windows,
better font handling, and more). Some of these features should become
available soon.
Work on Scicos continues. Some new features such as floating scope,
block and diagram documentation, supervisor block, use of PVM, etc,
should be made available soon. Better documentation describing in details
how Scicos works should also be available in a near future. Work on
real-time code generation using the software SynDEx is also under way.
Interfacing of a finite-element software is under way.
And more................................
What do we expect from Scilab users
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Contributions! Here are a few possibilities.
After the integer data types are made available in Scilab:
an image processing toolbox.
Read, write and processing of sound signals.
A statistical toolbox.
An identification toolbox.
A signal processing toolbox for Scicos.
Scientific course notes using Scilab (in all languages); note that if
you write a book in which you propose Scilab examples and exercises,
you can distribute Scilab on CD with the book.
GUI interface based on the tcl/tk interface.
A good place to discuss such projects is the scilab newsgroup.
Scilab: is it really free?
--------------------------
Yes it is. Scilab is not distributed under GPL or other standard
free software copyrights (because of historical reasons), but Scilab is
an Open Source Software and is free for academic and industrial use,
without any restrictions. There are of course the usual restrictions
concerning its redistribution; the only specific requirement is that we
ask Scilab users to send us a notice (email is enough). For more details
see Notice.ps or Notice.tex in the Scilab package.
Answers to two frequently asked questions:
Yes, Scilab can be included a commercial package (provided proper
copyright notice is included).
Yes, Scilab can be placed on commercial CD's (such as various
Linux distributions).
