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Raspberry Pi fans up in arms as Mathematica disappears from Raspbian downloads
Knickers have become ever so twisty over the last few days as fans of the diminutive Raspberry Pi computer and its Raspbian operating system noted that Mathematica had been "removed".
The conspiracy theories kicked off when users noted two simple words in the release notes for the latest and greatest version of Raspbian: * Removed Mathematica.
Discussions soon popped up on the Raspberry Pi Foundation's own forums and elsewhere as to what the exclusion might mean.
The leading theory was that the contract that allowed the Foundation to bundle the pricey system for free for the education-orientated Pi had expired. Mathematica Desktop for Students, after all, starts at £105 (plus taxes), so getting it for free made the Pi somewhat of a steal.
A Raspberry Pi engineer confirmed the expiration theory in a forum posting, stating: "The contract was for five years and has expired."
However, Wolfram Research contradicted this yesterday with a tweet confirming that Mathematica would indeed continue to be available on the Pi and even gave some handy commands to download the thing.
[...] El Reg additionally got in touch with the Raspberry Pi Foundation and were told by its head honcho, Eben Upton, that the issue was also one of download size (as observed by several forum posters). Upton observed that removing Mathematica "takes a chunk of size out of the most commonly downloaded image (it's never been present in the 'lite' image, but this also lacks the desktop and various other bits)".
However, with not a little bit of understatement, he added: "That said, there's been lots of grumbling, so we might end up putting it back."
Going forwards, Mathematica could well end up being installed on physical media (such as SD cards) but left as an option for downloads.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Wednesday October 17 2018, @09:21PM (2 children)
All these open source math packages are great. But. Remember, this is a PI we're talking about. You can't just build the sources on your PC and load them on the Pi. You'll need either a cross development environment on the PC (doable, but takes a lot of knowledge about what your doing. Or you can install the toolchain on your Pi and build it there. Again, not a trivial task.
Of course, all it takes is 1 person to build it for a Pi then do, I dunno, apt-put? the package for everyone to download.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 1) by NateMich on Thursday October 18 2018, @01:44AM
Why's that? That's what I did when I was first playing around with a Pi.
Later I just installed Gentoo on the Pi.
I hated Raspbian anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:00AM
Pretty sure Wolfram isn't going to let you even *see* the source.
But, if you aren't using a broken OS, setting up a cross build environment should be pretty easy. A basic armhf cross build environment is as simple to setup on Debian Stretch and above as:
apt-get install crossbuild-essential-armhf
(prior versions required adding an additional repository)
You will want other stuff, but it is as easy to install as on native.
Debian's multiarch system lets you add any foreign architectures as you need to be able to install libs you may need.
dpkg --add-architecture armhf
And, installing all build deps to build something already packaged by Debian is as simple as:
apt-get build-dep -a armhf packagename
And, pretty much anything you might need for your cross build environment as a binary is in the repos (e.g., objective C, Fortran, Ada, etc. compilers. For instance, 57 binary packages for cross build environments targeting armhf:
apt-cache search cross | grep arm | wc -l
57
For stuff that uses autoconf* (anything where you ./configure before make), you will want to install qemu-user (probably the static build), and setup binfmt to auto execute your foreign arch binaries under qemu-user. Again. easy on a sane OS:
apt-get install qemu-user-binfmt qemu-user-static
Above used armhf as an example, but armel, arm64, mips, ppc, etc. all work the same way.
*autoconf often builds test code bits and then tries to execute them to test build environment support for X feature. These need to be able to execute as the target arch. The above setup with qemu will handle running this and any other foreign arch binaries automatically under qemu-- just works.