Octave 4, a new way of looking at things ...

GNU Octave

Some time ago it was commented on GNU Octave, a powerful program for numerical analysis method-oriented matrix part of the GNU project, whose main feature is to be explicitly Free software, and offering the great advantage of being compatible at the language level to a high degree with its proprietary counterpart Matlab.

In recent months, various commands have been seen within the page Octave Forge that required to use version 4.0, something quite curious considering that it was in the RC version (at least until recently), fortunately on May 29 the stable version of GNU Octave 4.0.0 was officially released. which, among its new features, offers an official GUI that, regardless of being quite intuitive and functional, giving us control of directories, an editor, command line, variable control and command history, gives you a new face that to some extent It had not been seen in these directions, of course not disregarding the work of the creators of QtOctave that unfortunately was discontinued.

Octave GUI

For those adventurers who want to use or like me need some commands that are only available for version 4.0.0+ I leave a link to the download page at the end of the article, for us GNU / Linux users we will have to make use of the source code, here I provide the commands for ubuntu users and derivatives:

Previously, on some occasion I had a problem when installing libosmesa which left xserver disabled since there was a conflict between libosmesa and x11, this last time I had no problems, anyway, take your precautions before installation

wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/octave-4.0.0.tar.gz
sudo apt-get install gcc g++ gfortran make libblas-dev liblapack-dev libpcre3-dev libarpack2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev epstool libfftw3-dev transfig libfltk1.3-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgl2ps-dev libglpk-dev libreadline-dev gnuplot libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libhdf5-serial-dev openjdk-7-jdk libsndfile1-dev llvm-dev lpr texinfo libglu1-mesa-dev pstoedit libjack0 libjack-dev portaudio19-dev libqhull-dev libqrupdate-dev libqscintilla2-dev libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 libsuitesparse-dev zlib1g-dev libxft-dev autoconf automake bison flex gperf gzip librsvg2-bin icoutils libtool perl rsync tar libosmesa6-dev libqt4-opengl-dev
sudo apt-get build-dep octave
tar xf octave-4.0.0.tar.gz
rm octave-4.0.0.tar.gz
cd octave-4.0.0
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

Personally, I had problems compiling it due to the absence of libosmesa6 on my computer, if necessary, they should only install everything that the process indicates.

GNU Octave graph

I do not know if there are distributions that are already preparing the packages or even have already released the updates, for Windows users there is an executable file.
I hope this information is useful to you, and that it encourages those users who require a program of this type to try it, it is quite robust in operation, accessible at the language level and flexible by allowing its execution in terminal or gui, and that those enthusiasts who can go further, collaborate either in code or in donations to allow projects of this magnitude to continue in our environment.

Downloads Page

Here is a link to more details about the update


11 comments, leave yours

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  1.   Victor said

    In Archlinux it is already in the official repos 😀

  2.   Hugo said

    What good news. I installed it from the fedora repositories (version 22) and it is available now, good news. I had to modify the launcher in order to launch the default gui (with the –force-gui command).

    Could you do an article for PSPP? It is a free replacement of the IBM SPSS software, multiplatform and very fast to perform the analyzes (very fast). Currently you can open all system files for SPSS (* .sys, * .por, * .sav and * .zsav) and generate quality results file.

    Thank you!

    1.    erickisos said

      It is curious in many aspects, as I had read, version 4.0.0 already came with the GUI activated by default, is it not by chance the 3.8.2 you have? that already had a GUI but it was necessary to activate it with an "octave -force-gui" because it was in testing.
      Regards!

      1.    Hugo said

        You are right, it seems to me that there was an error in the numbering of the packages from the version before 4.0.
        If you install Octave from the fedora repositories, it tells you that the installed version is 4, however it is not when you open the application.
        For those interested using fedora, they can install the polarbear / bestof COPR repository that has the updated Octave packages (and other statistical packages):
        Use the command "dnf copr enable polarbear / bestof" without the quotes to install the repository, with that you will be able to install octave (dnf install octave) or update and that's it.

        regards

  3.   Eugenio said

    hold the pirate matlab

    1.    Christopher said

      Well I don't think it's a pirate, I bought it at the flea market, it cost money XD

  4.   Fernando said

    You have a PPA for Ubuntu with the latest versions.

    https://launchpad.net/~octave/+archive/ubuntu/stable

  5.   Rolando said

    Please, the RSS channel of this blog does not work, do not know what happens?

  6.   Total said

    In Ubuntu it is in the repos, and you can get a repo with the YPPA application.
    In Qtoctave there was only one Spaniard as the creator of the project, later Debian kept it.
    An alternative to Octave is Scilab

  7.   Logs said

    Hello, could you fix the rss please, it has not worked for several weeks. Cheers

  8.   switcher said

    For a couple of months it is also available on Gentoo (although at the moment it is marked as unstable).