Re: Woctave-another gui front end

[Ben Abbott]

On Dec 20, 2012, at 9:49 AM, edmund ronald wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I have a PhD in computer science, and used to teach AI. I wanted to
> re-learn some Fourier stuff so I hunted down Octave. I don't think I
> count as a beginner with computers.
> 
> The experience of getting this thing to work on the Mac was horrid.
> First I found a package, then I had to swap out Gnuplot, then it
> couldn't show do image stuff, then I had to install Macports and
> recompile and in the end it still couldn't do some stuff because of a
> bug iof the Mac Gnuplot terminal if I remember rightly so I had to
> switch to X11 and learn how to set the terminal yadda yadda. As for an
> environment I use the mac Terminal.app which thankfully has cut and
> paste ...
> 
> Frankly, Octave is a beautiful piece of work, but  it suffers from
> the Open Source mentality that you need to earn what you use. This is
> a piece of software which one cannot recommend to anyone at a decent
> university where they have a budget, simply because the time to get it
> to work is 3 or four days which is more than a Matlab license would
> cost. On a sidenote, the lab where I used to work dropped Matlab
> because it was too expensive, but I am starting to see what they are
> charging for.
> 
> Edmund

The most convenient approach to installing Octave on MacOS X is to do it the 
Linux way.

        http://wiki.octave.org/Octave_for_MacOS_X

Personally, I'd recommend using the Fink package manager to install Octave.

        http://wiki.octave.org/Octave_for_MacOS_X#Fink

Ben