W/SIMULINK 20 (907): Linux Windows Mac: Books. Developed by MathWorks, MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions.
For MS Windows, download the latest version from. The latest version in January 2009 was 3.0.3, so you would download and execute octave-3.0.3-setup.exe.
This is an executable file which will install Octave on your machine. You need to answer a few questions:. choose components - stick with suggested default. graphics backend selection - choose GnuPlot (JHandles doesn't support xlabel, title and other commands yet).
choose install location - stick with default. choose start menu folder - stick with default last tested: January 2009.
Basic octave installation on Mac OS X:. Starting from, scroll down to the Mac OS X section. Click on 'Octave Forge' and then on the link labelled 'Octave.app for Mac OS X'. Assuming you have an Intel Mac, then you should select octave-3.0.3-i386.dmg (which points to ) (The particular version number may change, this is up-to-date as of March 2009.). This will give you the right file.
Make sure you read the 'readme' which suggest to install GNUPLOT which is already included in the disk image that you have downloaded. This file is disk image, from which (once you have mounted them by double clicking on the dmg file) you can drag the octave (and Gnuplot) application into the application folder. Matlab's default settings for allowed absolute and relative error tolerances (and related to that step size in the integration) differ from Octave's. Octave has a larger step size. A student reports that on Mac OS X, they cannot type edit myfile.m to open an editor to edit the file. The edit command (in Matlab) will start an editor instructing it to load the file myfile.m if it exists, or creating an empty file and loading it into the editor if the file does not yet exist.
The default editor is part of the MATLAB Graphical User Interface. As there is no such GUI for Octave, the edit command in Octave (on any operating system) is likely to try to invoke the default editor that has been defined. On Unix (this includes Linux and Mac OS X), it is common to set an with name EDITOR to contain the name of the desired editor. If you find that the edit myfile.m command does not work satisfactorily, the simplest work around is not to use it. Instead you can open the m-file directly in some text editor of your choice.
You need to make sure you save the file myfile.m, before you execute the file by either typing myfile at the Octave prompt, or calling myfile if myfile.m contains a function. You need to make sure the octave program is in the same working directory as the file.
You can use the commands pwd (Print Working Directory) in octave to display the current directory and cd to Change Directory: octave:1 pwd ans = /Users/fangohr octave:2 cd tmp octave:3 pwd ans = /Users/fangohr/tmp octave:4 cd. Octave:5 pwd ans = /Users/fangohr octave:6 Any will do. On all platforms Emacs is available (although it might need some getting used to): We recommend for Windows, Emacs or for Linux and for Mac OS X. All of these support syntax highlighting for matlab files (and also for LaTeX files).
Another often used cross-platform editor is. You can also use Textedit on Mac OS X (which is very basic but comes with Mac OS X preinstalled), edit on Windows (which is even more basic) or any other source code text editor (see list of these on ).