Island 94 » osx http://www.island94.org Ben Sheldon's lost & found Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:04:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Setting up Octave and Gnuplot on Apple Mac OSX http://www.island94.org/2007/09/setting-up-octave-and-gnuplot-on-osx/ http://www.island94.org/2007/09/setting-up-octave-and-gnuplot-on-osx/#comments Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:37:47 +0000 Ben 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).

  1. Download the Octave binary for OSX from Octaveforge.
  2. 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)
  3. If you are using OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or 10.5.8+ you may need to perform some additional steps outlined here
  4. 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)
  5. Download and install (again in /Applications) Aquaterm which will actually render the gnuplot graphs.
  6. Within Gnuplot, set the renderer: “terminal aqua”
  7. 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.

Update (January 24, 2010): updated the link in step #1 to the latest version of Octave. Added an additional step described by Zack in the comments (thanks!)

No related posts.

]]> http://www.island94.org/2007/09/setting-up-octave-and-gnuplot-on-osx/feed/ 29