Re: Matlab for Debian?

[Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk (Ted Harding)]

( Re Message From: Mark Phillips )
> 
> Can you get Matlab for Debian?  Someone told me that Matlab is
> only supported by RedHat.  Does anyone know?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Mark Phillips                                      mark@maths.flinders.edu.au

The Mathworks sell Matlab for Linux. It would probably work on any
well-put-together Linux distribution. However, MathWorks are careful about
what platforms they are prepared to guarantee support for, and at present
they mention "Red Hat 4.x or Slackware 96 with X Windows X11R6".

See

    http://www.mathworks.com/productsdata/matrix/

and select the "Intel PC - Linux" platform in the left-hand panel.

An alternative to MatLab which is worth considering is octave, which is
GPL software closely compatible with MatLab in many respects. The main
differences are

a) Octave graphics is distinctly less capable than Matlab's, and not
   interactive (being based on gnuplot by default, but you can try to
   enhance this using some other graphics package -- not trivial, but
   possible);

b) MatLab's many toolboxes and other add-ons for particular classes of
   task have little counterpart in octave (though there are quite a few
   contributed m-file packages for octave), and the equivalent of MatLab's
   dynamically linkable ".mex" files has only recently been approximately
   emulated in octave (I don't yet know how close this emulation is).

However, as many have found, the close compatibility means that many,
though not all, ".m" files written for MatLab will work in octave with
little or no modification. I don't think (though I stand to be corrected)
that any MatLab ".mex" file will work as it stands with even the latest
octave.  You would probably have to work out how to create your own.

For octave, ftp to ftp.che.wisc.edu/pub/octave

Pre-compiled binaries are in ftp.che.wisc.edu:/pub/octave/BINARIES: I'm not
sure whether the very latest (2.0.8) has yet been compiled up for Linux.

Ted.                                    (Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk)


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