## Friday, June 28, 2013

### GNU Octave as an Alternative to MatLab

GNU Octave, FreeMat and Scilab are free open source software for numerical calculations alternative to MATLAB. After reading reviews in the Internet, I chose GNU Octave to try. Installing GNU Octave on a Windows system is easy. Download the files from its Download page and extract them to a folder. Then, you can put the shortcut at a desired location and change the path and the icon in its properties. When you open GNU Octave by clicking the shortcut, a window will appear as shown in the following figure. You can key in MATLAB commands there directly.

You can also write a MATLAB file with .m extension and use it. Use 'chdir' command to change the path and enter the file name with a semicolon at the end. To exit Octave, you can enter 'exit' or 'quit'.
chdir('C:\Octave');
eg_mesh;

I used macports to install octave on OS X using the command- "sudo port install octave +gcc48". Package such as control package can be installed by entering the command "pkg install -forge control" in the octave command windows. For Ubuntu, the following commands can be used.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:octave/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install octave

I have also tried FreeMat. User interface looks better and easier than Octave. But some MATLAB commands are not compatible to FreeMat.