Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Entry submitted by Diwaker Gupta. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Qalculate’s tagline says “the ultimate desktop calculator”. Though this might sound a little obnoxious, Qalculate lives up to its claims.

So what is qalculate? First and foremost, its a calculator. Which means that it can do what you typically expect a calculator to do, no surprises there. Here’s a screenshot of the main window.

There’s a convenient history window as well, and a handy keypad if you should need it.

But one rarely needs to use the keypad because another great thing about qalculate is the input mechanism – it is extremely smart, context sensitive and natural language oriented. So converting 50 kgs to lbs is as simple as typing “50 kgs to lbs”! And if you don’t know how to represent a unit (pounds or lbs), not to worry, qalculate will provide completion options as you go along:

And then qalculate can be used to do a lot of other things: simplify algebraic expressions, solve equations, a plethora of banking related functions (compute accrued interest etc), unit conversion, some basic plotting (via Gnuplot) and a lot of geometry related functions. Note that the Qalculate user interface has been implemented both in Qt and GTK, and so it will fit right into your desktop whether you are using KDE or GNOME.

Check out the full feature list, and also take a look at some of the screenshots.

qalculate is available in Debian sarge (v. 0.7.2). Version 0.9.x is also available in Debian testing/unstable, and Ubuntu since Dapper. And there are no open open bugs!