Sage and Enthought Python Distribution
This article looks at two different ways to use a Linux workstation for scientific computation. The first is the Sage open source mathematics system and the second is the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD). Both use a number of core open source Python tools under the covers to perform the heavy lifting. If you want to try them, install the individual pieces using the Ubuntu software manager.
Sage is the more comprehensive of the two in that it is more of a shell over a number of different underlying engines. From the Sage command line you can even interact with commercial products such as MATLAB or Mathematica. At the Sage prompt you essentially interact with IPython with access to all its features. You also have to think in terms of objects and methods when you start to explore the capabilities of Sage. Sage includes a number of different computer algebra systems and allows the user to interact with them from the command line.
It's important to note that Sage is based on Python but does pre-parse each statement before passing it to the Python interpreter. This can cause some confusion when looking at simple interactive Sage commands. The rationale for this behavior is a desire to make typing commands into Sage as intuitive from a mathematical sense as possible. One good example is the symbol for exponentiation. In pure Python you must type 2**4 to raise two to the fourth power. In Sage you use the up arrow symbol (^), as in 2^4. Sage also handles some operations such as integer division differently than basic Python.