Hello Yigel, You mention many important issues that the GNU/Linux community must tackle in order to move into the desktop operating system space. Some may claim that we are already there. I know that we are not, and it may be a few more years until we finally get there, but when it happens it will be like opening the flood gates. The fact that Debian makes available 15,000 packages freely available is mind-boggling. That is a lot of software (although, as you illustrate, a lot of it is not exactly user-friendly and well-documented...yet). The OSDL just started to provide direction (this month) so that we may get to the point of providing a premier desktop OS.
The primary reason for the advanced state of mathematica and other commercial software is indeed money. wolfram charges something like $2,000 per copy of mathematica (likely much cheaper for students, you have to phone them), and as such can employ a small army of mathematicians and usability experts to make user-friendly code that is ahead of the competition. We have precious few volunteers and rely on the kindness of user feedback and contribution to make better code. Hence we need your help. We don't want you to spend all your time figuring out problems. If you are, you should spend more time posting to debian-laptop, debian-user, etc. and use sites like linuxquestions.org. If you have a particular problem and spend more than an hour on it, I would search on google and other sites for another hour, then ask for help. There are a lot of experienced users out there ready and willing to help. As a student, you should a have access to a UNIX computer lab (every Physics department should have one because most scientific software is written for UNIX platforms). On these lab systems, they should have available software that their students need such as Mathematica, Maple, MATLAB, etc. Because all UNIX environments use common communication mechanisms (ssh, rsh, etc.) and graphical communication (X), you can log in remotely to these systems and run the software as if it resided locally on your system (without paying anything). Find out the ip address for the system, then type "ssh -l <username> <ip address>", then run your program "$ mathematica". also, if your advisor has government grants, he can likely get you an account on government hpc (high performance computing) resources which have programs like mathematica available. As for your problem with the modem, it is likely philosophical. Many modems have their core algorithms run as a closed Windows binary (winmodems), which for some reason we have not yet reverse engineering or duplicated (or if so are prevented from distributing due to patents or some other restriction). Hence, we can't include this code in a free distribution. I would suggest checking out the SUSE distribution because they do include and license certain proprietary components, and may support your hardware. However most of the software that you are interested in will not be packaged for SUSE (because they don't have a collaboration of 1,000 packaging volunteers). the other possibility is to buy a new pcmcia modem that you know is supported on linux. Anyway, I see that you're giving up. Please don't without a fight. There are ways to accomplish your goals. Good luck and best regards, Mike Gilbert
