Recently I am working on Stanford Machine Learning Course By Andrew NG on Coursera, Andrew recommended Octave to build prototype quickly. It’s been tricky to install octave on Mac, so I shared my process of intalling it.

1.Install XQuartz

2.Install Xcode and Command Line Tools3

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$ xcode-select --install

3.Install homebrew

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$ brew doctor
$ brew update && brew upgrade

It’s important to solve all the warning in homebrew, so it can work smoothly when installing octave.

4.Import the scientific computing packages

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$ brew tap homebrew/science

5.Install Octave

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$ brew install octave

6.Install gnuplot

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$ brew install gnuplot

(Update: As phseven pointed out, gnuplot will be automatically installed with octave, but in some cases it won’t support X11.) For such cases, do the following:

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$ brew uninstall gnuplot
$ brew install gnuplot --with-x

If you plot something in Octave, and it occures problems like this:

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gnuplot> set terminal aqua enhanced title "Figure 1"  font "*,6" dashlength 1
	           			^	        	
	    line 0: unknown or ambiguous terminal type; type just 'set terminal' for a list

Just run:

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setenv("GNUTERM","X11")

befor you plot anything, e.g.,

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plot(x,y)

It will be convenient if you setup Octave startup file: vim ~/.octaverc and add the line setenv GNUTERM x11.

7.Open Octave just run octave, if you want to change the look of your Octave, just input PS1('>> ')

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octave:1>
octave:1> PS1('>> ')
>>
>>

Reference: http://jatinganhotra.com/blog/2014/01/21/installing-octave-on-os-x-10-dot-9-mavericks/

Original link: http://sumnous.github.io/blog/2014/07/13/install_octave/
 Written by sumnous Posted at http://sumnous.github.io