qtOctave, another matlab-like computational software, free!

You will find qtoctave in the standard Ubuntu software repositories. And a simple
sudo apt-get install qtoctave will install the software with the need dependencies, all automatically! Life is simple with Linux. Sorry, but I hesitate in showing you how to install in Windows since I don't have a machine with the virus friendly OS around.

Of course, you can run Octave from the primitive looking command line, but why suffer? QtOctave gives you both Octave with an eyecandy Qt gui, making you more productive and wont make you look like a dinosaur when in a room full of Windows or even Mac users.

When you click on qtOctave in Applications/Science/qtOctave in a Gnome desktop, you will be presented with the following screen (with Help/Octave help enabled). qtOctave gave me an opening message that it requires an Octave 3.2.0 version. The Ubuntu version I have is 3.0.5, so hopefully the Ubuntu maintainers will give an update soon! QtOctave itself is at version 0.8.2.

The current version of Octave does not evaluate the expression exp(e * pi) in the terminal window.Will need to download the latest version of Octave!

The home page of Octave is Octave home page

Will come back in a week or two. Stay tuned.

July 4, 2010: I have downloaded the latest stable Octave 3.2.4, but the make process is taking a long time, even with a dual core machine.

-lX11  -lreadline  -lncurses -ldl -lhdf5 -lz -lm  -lfreetype -lz -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lGL -lGLU 
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `r_imag'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `c_exp'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `i_len'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `d_int'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `c_sqrt'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `e_wsfi'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `d_sign'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `s_wsle'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `r_mod'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `c_div'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `r_cnjg'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `s_copy'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `s_cmp'
../src/liboctinterp.so: undefined reference to `s_wsfe'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `do_lio'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `c_log'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `r_int'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `pow_dd'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `i_indx'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `s_wsfi'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `z_abs'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `s_stop'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `r_sign'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `pow_di'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `d_lg10'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `pow_ri'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `e_wsle'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `s_cat'
../src/liboctinterp.so: undefined reference to `do_fio'
../src/liboctinterp.so: undefined reference to `e_wsfe'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `c_abs'
../libcruft/libcruft.so: undefined reference to `d_mod'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [octave] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/toto/Downloads/octave-3.2.4/src'
make[1]: *** [src] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/toto/Downloads/octave-3.2.4'
make: *** [all] Error 2

Nuts! So we have no choice but to wait for the Ubuntu version??!!

July 4: We removed qtOctave and old versions of Octave via Synaptic,
choosing the latest 3.2 series for Octave.
When we reinstalled qtOctave the terminal now works. For example:

>>> exp(i * pi)
ans = -1.0000e+00 + 1.2246e-16i
>>> sqrt(-1)
ans =  0 + 1i

Now that it runs, we will have impetus to write future articles for octave, the poor man's
matlab-like clone.