> I just learned about this software from my mathematician son, and I think > it looks like a pretty nice, well-developed system for symbolic math: Have you seen wxMaxima? It's an interface to Maxima, and I strongly prefer it over Sage. Sage is kind of a pain to set up because it runs in a web browser. Sage runs Maxima anyway for all of the heavy lifting, so the performance will be about the same. If you're just looking to try it out, you can always use the Sage Online Notebook (http://www.sagenb.org/) to start. Then you can compare it with the easy-to-install wxMaxima (in the repos) and see if Sage is worth the install. :) -Max