Downloading Octave
There are several different versions of Octave available for download:
| Octave version | Version | Release Date |
| Stable (also currently ancient and obsolete) | 2.0.17 (.tar.gz) (.tar.bz2) | 12 Apr 2002 |
| Testing (you probably want this) | 2.1.73 (.tar.gz) (.tar.bz2) | 22 Mar 2006 |
| Development (latest features, but expect a few rough spots) | 2.9.5 (.tar.gz) (.tar.bz2) | 22 Mar 2006 |
A collection of contributed packages for Octave is available from http://octave.sf.net.
Binaries for Linux distributions are generally available with the distribution (Debian, SuSE, RedHat, and others have packages).
There are several choices for OS X binaries:
If you have trouble transferring Octave from this site, you might try one of those listed below. They mirror the files from ftp://ftp.octave.org/pub/octave.
http://ftp.eos.hokudai.ac.jp/pub/GNU/misc/octave
http://ftp.math.uni-hamburg.de/pub/soft/math/octave
http://ftp.u-aizu.ac.jp/pub/SciEng/numanal/Octave
The latest stable release of the Octave sources may also be found on the official Free Software Foundation ftp site, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu, which is also mirrored on many sites around the world.
The latest development sources of Octave are also available via anonymous access to a read-only CVS archive. There are also web interfaces to the archive available at http://www.octave.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi and. http://www.octave.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi.
If you decide to use the development sources from the CVS archive, please read the file ftp://ftp.octave.org/pub/octave/bleeding-edge/README.
Assuming you have CVS and ssh installed on your machine you may check out the latest development version of Octave sources with the following sequence of commands:
Set CVS_RSH in your environment to
sshSet CVSROOT in your environment to
:ext:anoncvs@www.octave.org:/cvsOr alternately add
-d :ext:anoncvs@www.octave.org:/cvsin the CVS commands below (place it immediately after cvs,
before any other CVS arguments).
Issue the command
cvs -z 9 checkout octaveto check out the all of the current development sources for Octave.
Once you've got the repository checked out, cvs update
will sync your local copy with the repository. See the CVS manual for
additional information on how to use CVS.