I have used Matlab a lot over the last seven years or so. Mathworks give away Matlab to all engineering students so they are "intoxicated" and demand Matlab when they start working. Really smart!
Well, there are several alternatives to Matlab. I have used octave for a while, but the plotting capabilities are not good enough to make a switch.
I also tried scilab, which I did not really like. I now stumbled over freemat. Time to give it a go!
Here is how I compiled it under debian testing.
as root (maybe all of the qt4-packages are not necessary):
apt-get install libqt4-dev
apt-get install lsb-qt4
apt-get install libqt4-gui
apt-get install g77
apt-get install libncurses5-dev
as user:
freemat source: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freemat/FreeMat-2.0.tar.gz?download
unpack
./configure (did not work)
./builddeps --with-ffcall --with-umfpack --with-umfpack --with-fftw --with-fftw --with-blas --with-lapack --with-arpack --with-matio
./configure (now it worked!)
make
as root:
make install
as user:
FreeMat
the figure is created with
plot(rand(100,2),'o')
print('fil.png')
