General information =================== The octave-doc package contains extra documentation in PDF and HTML formats which can be found in the doc-base system or directly under /usr/share/doc/octave once this supplementary package is installed. It also installs documentation in the Info format. Further information on Octave, the Octave mailing-lists and the Octave source archive can be found at https://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 (https://octave.sourceforge.io/), 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 install' command at the Octave prompt and may interfere with the package management system in Debian. Note that Octave is not configured to autoload the installed packages. This means that the functions provided by the installed packages will not be available at the Octave prompt at startup. Therefore, each package must be individually loaded by using the `pkg load' command. One way to automatically load all the installed packages at startup time is to add the following code to the initialization file `~/.octaverc': pkgs = pkg ("list"); for i = 1 : numel (pkgs) pkg ("load", pkgs{i}.name); endfor If you do this, remember that other users may not have Octave configured to load packages at startup. Therefore, if you write code for others, your scripts still need to load the packages they require. 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. -- Sébastien Villemot , Thu, 11 Jun 2020 11:00:24 +0200