root on kubuntu

Even if root sucks, I got to install it on several machine (laptop, office desktop, home deskop...). So here it is the recipe for a Kubuntu box.

• install X11 pixmap library and its development headers:

sudo apt-get install libxpm4 libxpm-dev 

• download source tarball, e.g root_v5.17.02.source.tar.gz from http://root.cern.ch/root/Version517.html

• actual install it:

sudo mkdir /root++
mv root_v5.17.02.source.tar.gz /root++
cd /root++
tar -xzvf root_v5.17.02.source.tar.gz
export ROOTSYS=/root++/root
cd root
./configure
make

where /root++ is the directory where you want to install root into.

Hope this can help someone else.

root sucks

You know, root sucks.

Awfully.

Coming from Matlab, I'm just trying Octave. Maybe you want more than the default gnuplot, in order to play around interactively with your graphs (rescaling, zooming, labeling...). Being in a hurry, I was not able to get OctPlot to work (I found X related problem...), but grace works very fine for me. You simply have to type toggle_grace_use at the octave prompt − notice that for me it doesn't work this toggle_grace_use inside kOctave, nor toggle_octplot; both of them works only from the octave terminal prompt. But if you have a frequently used alias for emacs -nw, this is fine :)

Let me play with this mix for more than a few hours in order to see if it could really replace Matlab, at least for not-so-high performance demanding tasks in everyday work...