Problems adapting Visual Style of Octave Graph

[Alaak]

Hi,

I got several problems adapting my Octave plots to some style
requirements and would like to ask this list if there are any known
solutions. Unfortunately I was unable to find them using Google. However
I only started using Octave for plotting this evening so I might miss
some essentials. Please enlighten me if you can. So here are my three
problems:

1. I would like to remove the upper and left ticks on the axes, without
also removing the left and lower ones.

2. I would like to change the line style of the grid. Using
set(gca(),'gridlinestyle','-'); seems not to do anything. Also set(0,
'defaultaxesgridlinestyle', '-') does nothing.

3. I would like to change the color of the axes. Since there seems to be
no linecolor property for them I tried to get a handel on them and set
the color property directly via set(get(gca(),
'children')(2),'color',[0.5 0.5 0.5]); Doesn't work though. I also
tried: set(gca(),'colororder',[0.5 0.5 0.5]) and
set(gca(),'defaultlinecolor','blue')

If it is important I am using Octave 3.6.2 under Ubuntu 12.04.

Regards and Thanks for any answers.