COMO 101: Using OCTAVE
Octave is a free, open source, rip-off of MATLAB. You can use either OCTAVE or MATLAB for the assignments. MATLAB is available in all the MATHS/PHYSICS student labs, and on some (but not all) of the CAL labs.
Mac OS X
- Download the installer disk here
- Open the AquaTerm directory, open 'AquaTermInstaller.pkg' and follow the instructions.
- Copy Gnuplot and Octave to you Applications folder.
- Run Octave. Two test, try the command plot(1:10) which should print 10 points on a diagonal line
Linux
Most Linux distributions have access to pre-packaged versions of octave and gnuplot via software repositories. Many also have access to QtOctave, a graphical front-end to the Octave program. Octave, gnuplot and QtOctave can be installed on a computer running Ubuntu from within the Software Center application, or at a command prompt:
sudo apt-get install qtoctave gnuplot
Likewise on Fedora:
sudo yum install qtoctave gnuplot
