The preliminary package has been updated to the latest upstream code recently. Meanwhile upstream also worked on better Octave compatibility. The status of this effort is documented here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/SPM/Octave There are a number of issue left to work on (both in SPM and Octave). Volunteers are very welcome to pick one and fix it! Michael -- Michael Hanke http://mih.voxindeserto.de