GNU Octave was written with the help of contribution from many developers including John W. Eaton. GNU Octave was first released on February 17, 1994. And, at the time of writing the article, latest stable release of GNU Octave is 5.2.0. It has been released under licence GNU GPL v3. In this article, we would discuss how to install GNU Octave in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release.
Octave is a high-level programming language. With the help of GNU Octave we can solve complex numerical problems such as linear/non-linear equations, linear algebra etc. Moreover, it provides us the flexibility to either use graphical or command-line interface.
Note: Following operations would require you to have superuser privileges. In case you don’t have one, then contact your System Administrator for assistance.
Install GNU Octave in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Since, the package is already available in standard Ubuntu repository. Therefore, first we need to update the Ubuntu repository. Hence, issue the following in terminal –
sudo apt update
This ensures, we get to install the latest version of the package.
Next, to install GNU Octave and related dependencies (if any) –
sudo apt install octave
Now, we can launch GNU Octave graphical version from our System’s main menu. Alternately, if we intend to work through Command-line interface then issue the following in terminal –
octave-cli
In conclusion, we have discussed how to install GNU Octave in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release.
Additional Info –
GNU Octave package also includes its documentation. It is always better to go through it once, if you are about to start using the application for the first time. The documentation is available on on disk as well as online. Click Help on Menu bar and Under Documentation, we would see two options – On Disk or Online.
It is worth mentioning here that, we can install packages in GNU Octave for additional functionality. One method to install packages is through Octave Forge. We will discuss that in coming articles.
