KDE provides a lot of general-purpose tools as well as a number of more specialized mathematics and scientific applications. We are interested in hearing how you make use of the software and tools KDE provides to help with your own research, teaching, or studies in science, engineering, or mathematics.

We would like to hear of original and unusual ideas that others might also want to take advantage of, like using nepomuk and strigi to keep track of your experimental data, but we would also like to hear what you might consider more obvious uses, like kmplot in a mathematics lecture or KDE pim applications to keep track of and schedule research subjects. So even if you think it may be obvious, please let us know.

This is something that has been already proposed in the nepomuk page and on userbase but I think it is worth to put it here too. the desktop must be made aware of bibliography. This can be made through nepomuk and a few modifications to kbibtex in the style of cb2bib. the strigi analyser for bibtex files is started in playground but currently seems to do nothing.
Once bibtex databases are properly fed to nepomuk, kbibtex (or some other inference agent) could start associating those entries with real files on disk.

From there, integration into kile. My ideal would be if kile could create a bibtex file with only the entries I cite, based on nepomuk's information.

The heaven of bibliography/desktop integration would be when I could retrace an idea to its original/oldest paper on disk.

This thread is about uses for existing KDE technologies. Please put feature requests in one of the other threads.

One of the first programs that blew my mind when I started using KDE in 2000 was klyx and I have stayed with it ever since for all my mathematical work and also for the advantages of the mathematical typesetting in non mathematical contexts.

I've not had the chance to use many mathematical programs under KDE because the courses I did tended to use a certain other OS which KDE does not yet fully support; but I always imported the results, whether data, graphics or screen images, into KDE to produce the finished product with LyX/KPDF/Okular, Kate, KWord etc. KWord 1.6 was particularly good at handling TXT imported formats.

I am scientist in the field of medical/biological research. Quite exactly one year ago I wrote my PhD thesis using 95% opensource and/or KDE software. In this time I developed/optimised my workflows for doing statistics, graphical visualisation and of course writing:

For all statistic analyses I had used the R software package since 2 years (normally only in terminal-mode, but rkward also provides a GUI). It is fast, scriptable and you can perform complex analyses very reproducible because you can save it as easy reusable R-source code files.
The same for most of the graphical visualisations. Graphs can be exported out of R as svg's and these I improved using inkscape and saved as pdf. For integrating the graphics in my tex-files I opened the pdf-page in gimp, cut to optimal size and saved as png. These were embedded in the tex-code with a fixed size (I often reworked some figures up to last minute during printing ).
For writing the tex-code I used Kile 2.0/1betax (yes, betas for productive work). If somebody is interested in the tex-templates, just ask me. My solution for all the reference work is zotero. It integrates into firefox and has quite a lot features, including the export to a bibtex-file. So the references are quite easy to handle and further easy to integrate into the tex code (although I played a lot with the correct style).

That was the way I completed my thesis and it worked quite well for me without any serious surprises.

By the way: I like the activities, as I have only one notebook for work and private life. I have two activities with my respective widgets schemes. So I can easily switch from work to regeneration .
Last but not least I like to listen to music during my work. So amarok is my favourite for that and many years ago it was a strong factor screwing me to the linux and kde world.

I use qalculate as my default calculator. Although it's a KDE3 application, it still works better for me than KCalc because it has more features and has support for infix notation...
It's like a little matlab which loads in seconds.

robsn81 wrote:The same for most of the graphical visualisations. Graphs can be exported out of R as svg's and these I improved using inkscape and saved as pdf. For integrating the graphics in my tex-files I opened the pdf-page in gimp, cut to optimal size and saved as png. These were embedded in the tex-code with a fixed size (I often reworked some figures up to last minute during printing ).

You might find this helpful:
If you export to eps instead you can use the LaTeX package psfrag to replace annotations with LaTeX (I used a separate LaTeX file for every graph), ensuring you have the same font in the whole document. Converting to pdf can be done with ps2pdf and pdfcrop then automatically crops away the whitespace.

Hey there,

i'm a student of physics and am currently a developer at a simulation project (c++).
For this I use KDevelop 4. I really like it's functionality. I also prefer it over Eclipse at the moment.

And although I mostly use vim and gvim for text editing, I often use Kate when having to handle multiple files. It is very comfortable with it's easy session options and other useful plugins.

But when it comes to data analysis and stuff, I have to say that I rather stick to specific and powerful tools like ROOT, Matlab and Maple.

Greetings,
Michael

hyperfluid wrote:But when it comes to data analysis and stuff, I have to say that I rather stick to specific and powerful tools like ROOT, Matlab and Maple.

Well, I think for ROOT there isn't any IDE-support, neither with KDE nor with any other project, but it integrates into Qt. I think R is much more important than ROOT, and for R there are two KDE-interfaces, although my university uses ROOT, too, but I think, we are at the same university, Aachen?
Matlab: SciLab and Octave seem to be really mature alternatives, but I have never worked with them.
Maple: There is Sage, really a good free alternaive, sometimes it is more difficult to use, but it has also benefits like Python and integration of various specialized tools. I think good gaphical support bby Cantor is really a good thing, Sage can really compete with Maple, although it might be not as mature as Octave (as I said, never tried Octave/Matlab).

Late to the party, but for bioinformatics, which is my field, I use a mixture of RKWard to handle R, kile for texts, kate for quick file editing (sorry, for harder jobs I use vim ) and I used to use kbibtex until I switched to KDE 4.x. I also make extensive use of activities.

@einar
Wow, thanks for the RKWard mentioning :-) Got to test it out!

In general -- field of statistics here,.. I'm an assistant lecturer, currently studying R and attempting to setup Cantor to work with it, now going to take a look at RKWard :)

Also using qalculate over kcalc, it's more powerful and has the one great feature, to write an expression first and calculate after :-)

Actually, one of the big reasons I use KDE is Kontact with everything that comes with it. Very tight integration :) And very convenient to jot down notes and to-dos, access them from the same app,...
Having many groups I have to write down somewhere the schedule, the current study week number (different from year week number), some other stuff,... many contacts, many group emails and phones. :) And KNotes provides a great space to write down the study week number in however big font

Maybe this should go to an Akonadi&co praising thread, but I'd mention that among other things there's Kmail that provides the one actual thing: the suggested emails in "To" also mention which address book they each come from.
I find it close to ingenious because one year I have a group, say, 112 with email group112 @ whatever.com; next year it becomes group 122 (2nd course), and there is a new 112 group with an email 112group @ whatever.com :-)
So, from that point (for me it turns very actual) organizing them into different study years seems the cure. :) Had more than enough time wondering which email is which :)

Also, Amarok. :)

Are there any applications for simulations or solving diff. equations that I can try? Thanks.

Cantor with the sage or maxima backend might be able to do this. kmplot can't really solve differential equations, but it can show differential plots.

Can't say I'm much of a scientist but I have the tendency of using the calculator in the "Run" tab that appears if you press ALT + F2. It's very convenient, easy to access and yet so functional. For example, it doesn't just support the standard ways of calculating things, but also sin(), cos() and tan().

When programming or scripting there is no better editor than Kate.

I am a college student of Huazhong University of Science&Technology ,China. I majoy in computer science .And I like kde.I think kde is my indispensable tool of my work and study.May Kde will be better in the future.