General information =================== The octave-doc package contains extra documentation in PDF form which can be found in the directory /usr/share/doc/octave-doc once this supplementary package is installed. Similarly, documentation in HTML format is available in the octave-htmldoc package, and documentation in Info format is in the octave-info package. Further information on Octave, the Octave mailing-lists and the Octave source archive can be found at http://www.octave.org The Debian Octave-related packages are collectively maintained by the Debian Octave Group (https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianOctaveGroup). Using ATLAS or OpenBLAS libs with GNU Octave ============================================ In order to speed up Octave's linear algebra operations, you can install the ATLAS package (libatlas3-base), or the OpenBLAS package (libopenblas-base). Octave should automatically pick up the faster libraries. For more information about BLAS and LAPACK in Debian, see: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/LinearAlgebraLibraries About Octave-Forge packages =========================== If you want to install packages from the Octave-Forge project (http://octave.sourceforge.net/), the recommended way is to use the packages distributed by Debian. Most Octave-Forge packages are available in Debian under the name octave- (for example, the statistics package from Octave-Forge is available as the octave-statistics package in Debian). The use of the `pkg' command at the Octave prompt is therefore discouraged and not supported by Debian. Why is mkoctfile not in octave, but in liboctave-dev? ===================================================== In order to use mkoctfile, one needs the development packages (headers, .a libraries) of the libraries used by Octave (fftw, blas, ...). These sum up to a lot of space; an installation of liboctave-dev will trigger the installation of these packages, so one can use mkoctfile then. pkg.m is not part of liboctave-dev as it's used to find already installed packages (via /etc/octave.conf). -- Sébastien Villemot , Wed, 12 Feb 2014 18:52:32 +0100