There are a number of Open Source alternatives to the program MatLab, one of the most known alternatives is GNU Octave. When using Octave you use a command line to enter commands. For a novice, the lack of a graphical interface might be intimidating; QtOctave provides a somewhat user friendly graphical interface to Octave.

Web Interface to Octave

There is a cloud-version of Octave at http://hara.mimuw.edu.pl/weboctave/web/index.php#menus; from this place you can run Octave from the Internet.

Portable QtOctave

If you use Windows there is a portable version of QtOctave that can be downloaded from http://qtoctave.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/qtoctave-portable/. The neat thing with the portable version is that you can install it to a usb-stick; you can hence use it at schools that only provide useless computers.

Using Ubuntu

Install QtOctave from Ubuntu Software Center.

Using Mac

It is easy to install Octave on a Mac; installing QtOctave however is tedious (Google on it). If you just want to try out Octave without having to spend a lot of time on installing QtOctave, use the Web Interface described above.

Using Windows

In order to use QtOctave you must first install Octave which can be downloaded from http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html. Download it and install it.

After installing Octave you can download QtOctave from http://qtoctave.wordpress.com/download/.

Download the zip-file from the link above. Right-click on the zip-file and choose Extract all. Pick a place where you want the qtoctave-directory. After extracting all files, go to the directory and then into qtoctave/bin, find the file qtoctave.exe, this is the executable file, don't move this file.

You can make a short-cut to the desk top by right-clicking on qtoctave.exe.

When you start QtOctave for the first time you might get an error message saying that it cannot find Octave; the program will start anyway but you will not be able to do anything without Octave. Find the file Octave.exe on your computer, the file is in a directory called bin (binary). Right click on the file and choose properties to see the file path. It might look like this:

C:\Octave\3.2.4_gcc-4.4.0\bin

You must now specify this file path in QtOctave. Choose Config->General configuration. Click on the Octave-row and enter the file path.

Note that Windows uses "\" to separate directories whereas Unix/Linux uses "/"!

Getting help

If you need help, Google on either MatLab or Octave plus whatever you command/feature you want to know more about. Most of the homepages are made for viewers having a mathematical knowledge exceeding that of a student at school. MatLab is an abbreviation of Matrix Laboratory and the program itself is based on matrices; you can however use the program even though you lack a deeper understanding of linear algebra, in many cases you can think of the matrices simply as tables of numbers.