MathCAD

There is no free Application that can work with MathCADs formats or works in a similar way, at least nothing I know of. I was also not able to make MathCAD run with wine. Since MathCAD is needed for some math courses, we mathematicians are forced to own Windows for now. Virtualization is an option. I'm really sorry for beeing unable to provide a better solution for now, but I'll continue to work on it.

UPDATE: MathCAD 2001 seems to work fine with wine now, though I was not yet able to test it. Please refer to the wine AppDB entry and, if possible, post your result here.

I tried out some alternatives, which cannot be used for the TMAs (you have to provide printouts), but come in handy when you want to do some algebra, complex calculations or plot a graph.

Linux

 * There are quite some strong free CAS out there, including my favorite one: Maxima. You should also check out wxMaxima, a graphical user interface for Maxima.
 * Yacas is also very nice. There is an online version if you'd like to try it.
 * OpenOffice has a tool called Math, which is aimed at putting formulae into documents.
 * There are two mathcad -like programs that are open-source MiraMath and Smath that you can find. Miramath uses SciPy and a number of Python modules