Ubuntu Tip 02: Octave 3.6.1 in Ubuntu 12.04

UPDATE: Ubuntu 12.10 comes with Octave 3.6 and also the extra packages are in the repositories. It's better if you install directly from the repositories instead of using this steps, because it's easier to remove the extra packages later.

Last time I showed you how to get octave to run on the guake terminal at startup. For that tutorial, Octave 3.2, which is available in the universe repository, was used. This time, I'll show you how to install the version 3.6.1.

Normally installing Octave would require compiling from the source, which can take a few hours. Luckily, picaso has already done the hard job and has packed the compiled source in a nice PPA (launchpad.net).

The installations steps are shown below, the first step is for those who have already installed octave 3.2

sudo apt-get remove octave # If you have installed octave 3.2
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:picaso/octave
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install octave

Congratulations, you have installed a newer version of octave and have access to the core functions of Octave.

 If you are interested in more advanced functions for image processing, signal processing, control systems, etc. Then you need to get additional "packages" from here (sourceforge.net).

These extras packages must be compiled into our new Octave installation, and to compile them we need the "pkg" commands, which can be obtained using the following command.

sudo apt-get install liboctave-dev

(Note: Thanks to picaso for pointing out that octave-pkg-dev is deprecated, and that liboctave-dev should be used instead)

Using an example, I'll show the installation process of an Octave package.

 Let's say we want to install the "signal" package. First check the details of the package here. You'll notice that there are many dependencies that must be installed in the following order:

Miscellaneous

Struct 

Optim 

Specfun 

Control 

Image 

Signal

After downloading all the necessary packages, we proceed to compile them in octave:

sudo octave
# The following commands must be executed inside a rooted octave
cd /path/to/the/downloaded/packages
pkg install miscellaneous-1.1.0.tar.gz -auto
pkg install struct-1.0.10.tar.gz -auto
pkg install optim-1.2.0.tar.gz -auto
pkg install specfun-1.1.0.tar.gz -auto
pkg install control-2.3.51.tar.gz -auto
pkg install signal-1.1.3.tar.gz -auto
pkg install image-1.0.15.tar.gz -auto

(Note: The -auto modifier, tells the package manager to load that specific package when octave starts. For more information check "help pkg" in octave)

We're done, now we can start using the advanced features of octave (You might need to restart octave to enable the just installed packages).