I just started auditing a Mathematical Models in Biology class and Matlab is one of the requirements. I had relatively good experience with the free, open source alternative,Octave back in college, but then I was running Linux, not OSX. It took me about an hour to figure out how to set it up (I was a little worried for a bit).
- Download the Octave binary for OSX from Octaveforge.
- Install Octave and Gnuplot (in the extras folder). I just dragged them to /Applications (X11 is required for Gnuplot—should be found on OSX install disk)
- Set the environment variable for gnuplot (Octave is supposed to do this automatically, but it didn’t for me):
sudo ln -s /Applications/GnuPlot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot /usr/bin/gnuplot
(thanks for the help, Toby) - Download and install (again in /Applications) Aquaterm which will actually render the gnuplot graphs.
- Within Gnuplot, set the renderer: “terminal aqua”
- Try it out in Octave (I had to restart Octave and Gnuplot to get it all to work):
x = linspace(-pi, pi, 100);
y = sin(x);
plot(x, y);
Thank you: High Performance Computing for Mac OS X, the Octave Wiki and Google for helping me find what I needed.
