Freemat - Alternative to Matlab

Matlab is a powerful tool that allows you to perform computationally intensive tasks very easier way. Also you can write C, C++, and Fortran codes in Matlab. But it is a propriety software. There are several alternatives for it. Octave is one of them. You can use octave with qtOcatve GUI, and gnuplot will support for plotting applications.
To install octave simply type following command on the console

sudo aptitude install octave
sudo aptitude install gnuplot
sudo aptitude install qtoctave


The problem with Octave is that the poor plotting capability. FreeMat is a good alternative for that. Freemat is not listed in the repositories of Ubuntu. Hence, run following commands provide the platform for installing freemat.

sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev
sudo apt-get install lsb-qt4
sudo apt-get install libqt4-gui
sudo apt-get install g77
sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

download FreeMat Source Code (All platforms) from freemat web site


unpack
./builddeps --with-ffcall --with-umfpack --with-umfpack --with-fftw --with-fftw --with-blas --with-lapack --with-arpack --with-matio
./configure
make

sudo make install

freemat