matlab / scilab / octave

[Qtea]

I don't know anything at all about Scilab, but I'm a mechanical engineering student and I use Octave exclusively for my "Matlab" assignments.

I've been doing the same with Scilab and never had any complainments. I guess the most important thing still is to show that you've understood the theory and can do some practical computing based on it.

And I have no idea why any college would suggest using Matlab when there is an open source (therefore free, free, and peer reviewed) alternative. And I'm especially confused by college students who would rather spend $100 on a temporary license than download Octave for free, even after being shown the website, and even though there is now a pre-packaged Windows version. Must have more money than me.

Matlab is probably the most used program for numerical computing in the industry and the colleges are thus very interested in making the students fluent in Matlab, because they think that to be the industry's need.

I use Matlab - but my research grant pays for it

If I were a student, I'd defintely invest in the student edition - it's cheap and the mathworks support is excellent.

Hmm, how cheap it really is? The basic version is about $100 and the toolboxes are $60 each. If you begin with buying the basic version at the first year of your studies and later when you take advanced cources in eg. statistics, signal processing or system control, you're forced to complicate your Matlab with the toolboxes. You'll end up buying all their software, piece by piece and soon your system will cost far over $1000 - and that's still the student version.

[WebDrake]

Hi,

I haven't tried scilab nor octave yet. I have a couple of questions :

* If someone (for example a teacher) requires matlab code. Can I produce code using octave/scilab which will fully work (guaranteed) on matlab ?

* Is it easy/feasible to work together on code with people who might insist on using matlab (when I use scilab/octave) ?

* Is there some tutorial for working together with matlab ?

thanks guys

I don't know SciLab at all well, however, I do make use of Octave and have used MATLAB quite a lot in the past.

As other people have noted Octave is very close to MATLAB, with near-identical syntax and a great overlap of commands. For simple code I think you will find it easy to coexist. However, there are some key features which MATLAB has which Octave lacks, notably graphical functions. Octave plotting commands are quite limited in their possibility compared to MATLAB, although this will hopefully be changed in a big way in the forthcoming 3.0 release. Since Octave uses gnuplot as its plotting engine, it is possible to make use of direct gnuplot commands to produce a lot of what you may want, but obviously this is not MATLAB-compatible.

It's possible, with MATLAB, to produce quite attractive GUIs for data analysis environments (I worked in a lab which had produced a marvellous package to analyse neural data read from multielectrode arrays), but you couldn't do the equivalent with Octave at present.

For general purposes (not your MATLAB assignments) you might also want to take a look at R, which is most definitely not MATLAB-compatible, but has a whole bunch of useful data analysis possibilities.

Have a look at http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/FAQ.html#SEC24 for a brief note on some of the issues.

[skywatcher]

Hi everyone

If I may chip in at this stage, I share hizaguchi's sentiments:

And I have no idea why any college would suggest using Matlab when there is an open source (therefore free, free, and peer reviewed) alternative. And I'm especially confused by college students who would rather spend $100 on a temporary license than download Octave for free, even after being shown the website, and even though there is now a pre-packaged Windows version. Must have more money than me.

I have been using Matlab since 1989, and I must admit that one gets hooked on all the GUI features and toolboxes of the newer releases. But I must also admit that the cost of the software is prohibitive -- I'm lucky because my employer pays for it!

As a newcomer to Linux I installed octave a few days ago, and I plan to do some comparisons and look at compatibility etc. Hopefully I'll be able to answer some questions on this forum in future.

[vikasmk]

hi, i installed octave on my pc, but i could not plot any graphs bcos gnu plot wasnt there. but i could not download it from the package manager . it said there was some error and kept asking for the gutsy 7.10 cd rom . help me.......

[iml]

hi, i installed octave on my pc, but i could not plot any graphs bcos gnu plot wasnt there. but i could not download it from the package manager . it said there was some error and kept asking for the gutsy 7.10 cd rom . help me.......

Open Synaptic and Settings -> Repositories. Uncheck 'Cdrom with Ubuntu' and make sure main and universe are checked. Reload then try installing gnuplot.