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I personally never really understood hardware preferences. And this isn't just a Mac vs. PC thing; it could be Intel vs. AMD. I don't understand people who say they prefer Intel processors to AMD processors or vice versa. I mean, how can you tell? You can't access the processor directly, except through assembly language (which most hardware junkies don't use), so there are no neat features or hacks that you can play around with, like you can with software. As an illustration of my point, I prefer Firefox over other browsers because it has plug-ins I can add to it, it has a nice interface, it's fast, it blocks malware, it can handle hundreds of tabs open simultaneously without crashing, and I can edit the preferences easily. You don't have any of these options with CPUs, aside from maybe speed.

Bard is a Linux user; he has a half-hearted attempt at maintaining a Windows version but as he is a professor with other responsibilities he does not devote all his time to it. After all, he is not getting paid to develop XPP.

I had not spent any serious effort at getting XPP to run under Windows, as it worked fine under Linux. I know my professor, who is quite technically proficient, reported problems in getting recent versions of XPP to run properly under several different Windows machines.

At any given time, the price/performance ratio is on either AMD or Intel's side in one market or the other. That's all.

Don't kid yourself, the entire thing is a half-hearted attempt, especially the website. Any path he could have taken other than the one he did (writing low-level code directly on top of xlib) would have saved him time. The issue is that he's not a proficient programmer, not that he doesn't have enough time.

Wouldn't it have been possible for XPP to be written as a plug-in for Matlab or Mathematica?

He uses this software on a regular basis for his own research, as do a number of other scientists. The software itself is quite good. It is efficient, powerful, and versatile, and he uses the best algorithms available for numerical analysis. I'm not going to lie; he did not put a ton of effort into giving it a pretty interface. You are correct that he is not a professional programmer. XPP is nonetheless an extremely useful tool. It is the industry standard for what it does.

Some other professor (again, not a professional programmer and the result is rather crude) has written a Matlab program that tries to pull in the results from XPP. This is an imperfect solution even if his code were flawless: Matlab is a commercial, proprietary program and is prohibitively expensive for everyone but large institutions.

I've revised my instructions.

1. Install Xming from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/
2. Install the bitmap fonts from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/f ... s/7.5.0.11
3. Install the X version of XPP from http://www.math.pitt.edu/~bard/bardware ... xppwin.zip

Unzip the latter to C:\xppall. Run xpp.bat, not xppaut.exe.

It's a complete BS roundabout way of doing things but it works:

[img][650:518]http://lh3.ggpht.com/_A9av40lVPAo/S6RoRoX44QI/AAAAAAAAIs0/57IxndHL-c4/xpp2.png[/img]

I don't feel like rebooting into Windows to mess with that, but your screenshot looks more or less like what XPP is supposed to be. It's the previous version, though, but that shouldn't matter as version 6.00 is nothing ground-breaking.

I think the fonts you installed may have been the trick. I saw my classmates getting X server errors with strange messages about fonts.

Anyways. sudo apt-get install xppaut. Much, much simpler and easier, and it worked on the first try.

Apparently the reason Xming is only like 2MB is they leave all the fonts in a separate installer. Idiots.

Have it your way, but I just boiled it down for you to almost nothing. I'd encourage you to share the procedure with your classmates who are less Linux inclined.

This program looks remarkably like the stuff we used to use on the Apple II in high school. I'm half tempted to port it to Qt just for the hell of it. I'd sooner do Fractint though. Edit: There are some sort of awesome fractal viewers available these days