software-recommendation
I am currently doing some experimental work and I have a lot of data to trawl though. I use Gnumeric, and it's very good, but often I feel there has to be something better.
Ideally I would like the maximum number of features with a minimal learning curve, but really I'd just like to know if there is something better than Gnumeric that I can use for manipulating and plotting data.
What would you recommend?
I would suggest KiCad. It is an application that helps you create professional schematics and printed circuit boards.
You can easily install it by adding the following PPA to your system:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:adamwolf/kicad-testing-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kicad kicad-doc-en
I know back in the day (and we're talking about fourteen years ago, when I was using ASP) there were alternative implementations of ASP. The most famous and the only one I've ever seen running on not-Windows was ChiliSoft ASP.
But ChiliSoft were gobbled up by Sun. Sun killed off ChiliSoft's product but imbibed its soul and capabilities into Sun Server One. More time occurred and Sun were eaten by Oracle... Somewhere in that time the product died. Even if it does somehow exist still, I would bet a large pot of money on it not being maintained, let alone compatible with Linux 2.6+.
I shouldn't need to point that out but I need to highlight that nobody has considered it worthy of promoting in over a decade, let alone waste a ton of time reimplementing such a horribly limited language and framework.
There may be the possibility of getting an alternative implementation running under Wine. Or even a native one - but if your legacy code uses anything like an ODBC database (kids these days won't have a clue what I'm talking about), you're going to be stuffed.
The easiest way to deal with this is to just mirror your stack from 10 years ago. Bung a copy of Win2k on Virtualbox, and just host it the way it was designed for. Do your porting and then move all the files onto a flash drive (or Iomega Zip Disk if you hate anachronisms), tape that to a heavy rock and then and drop that baby in the ocean.
Note: Packages like Apache::ASP are red herrings. There are plenty of modules that give ASP-like interpretation. Apache::ASP gives a Perlscript-like spin on the whole thing but it won't let you run VBScript.
Note 2: ModVB exists but seemingly hasn't been touched since its inception in 2003. And that is based on mod_gb from 2002 which has had similarly low activity in the past decade. I'm not sure either of these would work with a modern Apache and you've still got ancillary issues (eg databases) still.
Note 3: You could also reimplement ASP yourself with a home-made parser written in whatever language you like. Most languages that have been around a while have language parsers. It'd probably be slower and buggier but it might be enough to actually run something. But seriously, if you're even considering this, you're very silly. Please just reimplement your site in a current language.
Best Answer
I am a Physics student and found that the best scientific plotting software for Ubuntu is QtiPlot. It is very similar to Origin, and works really well.