Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools. Which is a fancy way of saying that it's a debugging suite that automatically detects many memory management and threading bugs, which is a very good thing. Valgrind can handle dynamically generated code, so long as none of the generated code is later overwritten by other generated code. It can also perform detailed profiling to help speed up your programs. It comes with extensive documentation.

MATLAB is a numerical computing environment allowing matrix manipulation, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, and high-level programming language. Typically it is run on desktop installs, which is quite problematic if one is doing a large computational problem.

It seemed a trivial request, and once you've realised a couple of minor issues it is; install the NCDF library, a common scientific data format, for R, the well-known statistics software.

There is a usual way to install a package in R. Simply load the program and run the install.packages function; but this didn't quite work.


R
>chooseCRANmirror()
>install.packages(c("ncdf"))

There have been two fairly significant forks in the Linux world in the past few weeks; one is a large number of the developers of Mandriva now concentrating on on that technology under the new title Mageia. As advocates of that this new Linux distribution state: People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company..

CGAL (Computational Geometry Algorithms Library) provides efficient and reliable geometric algorithms in the form of a C++ library data structures and algorithms for triangulations, Voronoi diagrams, polygons and polyhedra, arrangements of curves and their applications, mesh generation, geometry processing, subdivision and parameterization, as well as estimation of local differential properties, and approximation of ridges and umbilics, alpha shapes, convex hull algorithms, search structures , interpolation, shape analysis, fitting, and distances, and kine

Open MPI is a message passing interface that combines the merger of three major MPI implementations (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, and LAM/MPI) to create a complete MPI-2 implementation. MPI is a language-independent communications protocol used to program parallel computers.

The following was written in my capacity as President of Linux Users of Victoria for a community group newsletter with minimal familiarity with computer systems.